Morphological Effects in Auditory Word Recognition: Evidence from Danish

In this study, we investigate the processing of morphologically complex words in Danish using auditory lexical decision. We document a second critical point in auditory comprehension in addition to the Uniqueness Point (UP), namely the point at which competing morphological continuation forms of the base cease to be compatible with the input, henceforth the Complex Uniqueness Point (CUP). Suffixed words with later CUP elicited longer response latencies. We also observed an interaction between suffix frequency and whole-word frequency. Both suffix and whole-word frequency were facilitatory, except for words for which both frequencies are high. For such words, we observed inhibition, and most clearly so for female compared with male participants. Finally, a comparison of complex with simple words revealed that, other things being equal, complex words have a processing advantage compared to simple words. We discuss the consequences of these findings for models of morphological processing. (Contains 6 figures and 7 tables.)