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The representation of inflection is controversial: theories of morphological processing range from those that treat all inflectional morphemes as independently represented in memory to those that deny independent representation for any inflectional morphemes. Whereas identity priming for stems and derivational affixes is regularly reported, priming of inflectional affixes is understudied and has produced no clear consensus. This paper reports results from a continuous auditory lexical decision task investigating priming of plural inflectional affixes in English, in plural prime-target pairs such as crimes → trees. Our results show statistically significant priming facilitation for plural primes relative to phonological (cleanse → trees) and singular (crime → trees) controls. This finding indicates that inflectional affixes, like lexical stems, exhibit identity priming effects. We discuss implications for morphological theory and point to questions for further work addressing which representation(s) produce the priming effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the processing of morphologically complex words in Czech. In Experiment 1 we employed morphological repetition priming to test the Split Morphology Hypothesis, i.e. whether derived and inflected word forms are stored in the same or different manner in the Czech mental lexicon. The results demonstrate significantly larger priming effects for inflected forms compared to derived forms indicating distinct processing of inflection and derivation in Czech; while inflected forms are fully decomposed during language comprehension, derived forms are either not, or only partially. In Experiment 2 we addressed two research questions. First, we tested the psycholinguistic reality of the linguistic distinction between two types of inflective verbal prefixes: (a) “purely” inflective aspectual prefixes (i.e. the prefix turns an imperfective verb into a perfective one as in hřešit (imp.; ‘to sin’) — zhřešit (perf.)) and (b) derivational verbal prefixes (e.g. krátit (imp.; ‘to shorten’) — zkrátit (perf.)). The results did not indicate any evidence that this distinction would be psycholinguistically grounded. Second, we examined the role of semantic transparency of the derivational prefixes in the processing. The experiment delivered evidence of slower processing of opaque derived verbs, most likely caused by double search/reanalysis.

Abstract: The aim of the study was to investigate how the input modality affects the processing of a morphologically complex word. The processing of Finnish inflected vs. monomorphemic words and pseudowords was examined during a lexical decision task, using behavioral responses and event-related potentials. The stimuli were presented in two modalities, visually and auditorily, to two groups of participants. Half of the words and pseudowords carried a case-inflection. At the behavioral level, the inflected words elicited a processing cost with longer decision latencies and higher error rates. At the neural level, pseudowords elicited an N400 effect, which was more pronounced in the visual modality. Inflected words elicited an N400 effect in both modalities, which, however, differed in topography and latency. The N400 effect for inflected words most probably reflects access and possible integration of the stem and suffix. The results suggest that the inflectional processing cost stems from the later, lexical-semantic stage of processing in both modalities. The ERP responses to inflected pseudowords did not differ from the ERP responses to monomorphemic pseudowords in either modality, suggesting that combinatorial case-inflection processing requires a real word stem in order to proceed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this study we introduce an information-theoretical formulation of the emergence of type- and token-based effects in morphological processing. We describe a probabilistic measure of the informational complexity of a word, its information residual, which encompasses the combined influences of the amount of information contained by the target word and the amount of information carried by its nested morphological paradigms. By means of re-analyses of previously published data on Dutch words we show that the information residual outperforms the combination of traditional token- and type-based counts in predicting response latencies in visual lexical decision, and at the same time provides a parsimonious account of inflectional, derivational, and compounding processes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study investigates the differences in the input representations of verbs and nouns in the Italian mental lexicon. One visual lexical decision experiment in which the stem homograph effect (Laudanna, Badecker, & Caramazza, 1989) was evaluated on noun and verb targets is reported. Strong inhibitory effects on verb targets preceded by stem homographs relative to nonhomographic word pairs were found. The effects on verb targets were also much more reliable than the effects on noun targets. The pattern of results provides support for the hypothesis that noun and verbs are differently represented in the orthographic input lexicon. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]