Theories of embodied semantics (ES) suggest that a critical part of understanding what a word means consists of simulating the sensorimotor experience related to the word’s referent. Some proponents of ES have suggested that sensorimotor activations are mandatory and highly automatic during semantic processing. Evidence supporting this claim comes from masked priming studies showing that unconsciously perceived spatial words (e.g., up, down) can directly modulate action performance on the basis of their meaning.

In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a “morphologically transparent” way or in a “morphologically opaque” way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation.

Although masked stem priming (e.g., dealer–DEAL) is one of the most established effects in visual word identification (e.g., Grainger et al., 1991), it is less clear whether primes and targets sharing a suffix (e.g., kindness–WILDNESS) also yield facilitation (Giraudo & Grainger, 2003; Duñabeitia et al., 2008).

A largely overlooked side effect in most studies of morphological priming is a consistent main effect of semantic transparency across priming conditions. That is, participants are faster at recognizing stems from transparent sets (e.g., farm) in comparison to stems from opaque sets (e.g., fruit), regardless of the preceding primes. This suggests that semantic transparency may also be consistently associated with some property of the stem word.