Models of Lexical Access and Morphological Processing

What is it about?

Humans possess the ability to discriminate among meanings for a practically unlimited number of possible utterances. This ability to make and understand new combinations defines productivity and has been extensively studied with respect to combining words into sentences. However, an analogous ability exists at the level of combining morphemes into words. This is the essence of a combinatorial approach to language phenomena. In the combinatorial tradition, many studies in psycholinguistics use words composed of multiple morphemes, defined as morphologically complex. We focus on behavioral and electrophysio-logical measures on derived words to discuss experimental findings pertaining to the processing of morphologically complex words with and without so‐called semantic transparency. Discussion is particularly animated in the domain of morphology, therefore, word recognition for morphologically complex words is where we concentrate.

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Why is it important?

We differentiate between lexicon‐based and learning‐based models of lexical access and representation and describe how each accounts for morphological effects in early and late word recognition. Then we select from the experimental evidence with behavioral and electrophysiological measures in the lexical decision task to portray the debate about how morphologically complex words are recognized. We highlight data about inflections and derivations not only in English but also in other languages (German, Hebrew) to demonstrate how cross‐linguistic comparisons can enrich models of morphological processing.