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Semantic transparency is a crucial factor in the processing of morphologically complex words, but seems to have a different impact depending on experimental conditions and languages. In English, semantic transparency is necessary to produce morphological priming in cross-modal priming, but not as clearly so in masked priming. The available reports of priming effects for opaque prime-target pairs are not as clear-cut as to rule out an explanation in terms of orthographic overlap. Experiment 1 was set out to clarify that issue in French. The novel notion of "pseudo-derivation" we introduce proved useful to show that surface morphology alone can produce priming effects in masked priming. In contrast, pure orthographic overlap produces marginal inhibition. Experiment 2 used auditory-visual cross-modal priming and showed that only semantically transparent words facilitate the recognition of their base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]