Processing and Representation of Different Types of Czech Affixes

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.