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The present studies investigated the influence of the semantic and syntactic predictability of an inflectional morpheme on word recognition and morphological processing. In two eye-tracking experiments, we examined the effect of syntactic and semantic context on the processing of letter transpositions in inflected words. Participants experienced greater and earlier disruption from cross-morpheme letter transpositions when target verbs appeared in a context that syntactically predicted the presence of a past-tense suffix. Further, internal transpositions caused greater and earlier disruption even in monomorphemic verbs when syntactic context created an expectation of morphological complexity. No effect of semantic predictability was observed, potentially because the semantic manipulation was insufficiently strong. The results reveal that syntactic contexts typical of most English sentences can lead readers to make predictions about the morphological structure of upcoming words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between stem and whole-word frequency was investigated by simultaneously manipulating both frequency measures in a set of inflected verbs. In Experiment 1, these verbs were presented in isolation as part of a lexical decision task, and an effect of stem frequency only was observed. In Experiment 2, the same verbs were presented in sentences in a self-paced reading task, and an interaction between stem and whole-word frequency was observed. These findings contradict “either–or” models of morphological processing that assume two separate and independent processing routes for morphologically complex words, and also provide further evidence that the relationship between stem and whole-word frequency effects is context-sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]