Equivalent Effects of Inflected and Derived Primes: Long-Term Morphological Priming in Fragment Completion and Lexical Decision

Previous studies of long-term morphological priming have obtained a mixed pattern of results: Although some studies have found larger effects of inflected primes than of derived primes, others have found that inflections and derivations have equivalent effects. We reexamined this issue in four experiments in which the inflected and derived primes were paired with the same target words (e.g., believe, believed, believer ) and were equated in terms of their orthographic similarity to the targets. Across these experiments, inflections and derivations consistently produced equivalent levels of priming, both in the word fragment completion task (Experiments 1 and 3) and in the lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 4). The implications of these findings for current models of the processing of morphologically complex words are discussed.