Morphological Structures and Lexical Access

Abstract

The three experiments reported in this paper addressed the question of whether the frequency of the root-morpheme of a word (e.g., sent from sentire, to hear) or the frequency of the surface form of a word (e.g., sentito, heard) determines decision latencies in a lexical decision task. The results indicate that both root-morpheme and word surface frequency contribute to variation in lexical decision times supporting previously reported experiments by Taft (1979). We argue that these results support a model of lexical organization that represents words in morphologically decomposed form. We also propose, however, that the address procedure for these representations do not require that the stimulus input be parsed into roots and affixes but can be addressed through a whole word address system.