Morphological Processing
Morphological processing concerns how complex words built from stems and affixes are recognized, stored, and decomposed during language use.
Definition
The study of how the recognition and representation of morphologically complex words draw on their internal morpheme structure.
Scope
This topic covers whether morphologically complex words are recognized whole or decomposed into morphemes, the evidence from masked priming for early form-based segmentation, the difference between inflection and derivation, and how morphological structure interacts with meaning. It describes the experimental findings and competing accounts of lexical storage.
Core questions
- Are complex words stored whole or decomposed into morphemes during recognition?
- Is early decomposition driven by form alone or by meaning as well?
- How do inflection and derivation differ in processing?
Key concepts
- morpheme
- affix stripping
- decomposition versus whole-word storage
- semantic transparency
- masked priming
Key theories
- Obligatory decomposition
- Taft and Forster's proposal that complex words are recognized by stripping affixes and accessing the stem, implying decomposition prior to lexical access.
- Morpho-orthographic segmentation
- Rastle and colleagues' finding that even pseudo-complex words (such as 'corner') are segmented early on the basis of surface form, suggesting blind, form-based decomposition.
- Meaning-based morphology
- Marslen-Wilson and colleagues' evidence that semantically transparent morphological relatives prime one another, linking morphological representation to meaning.
History
Taft and Forster's 1975 affix-stripping studies launched processing research on morphology; later masked-priming work, including Rastle and colleagues' 2004 demonstration of form-based segmentation, refined the debate over decomposition.
Debates
- Form-based versus meaning-based decomposition
- Whether early morphological decomposition is purely orthographic and blind to meaning, or whether it is sensitive to semantic transparency.
Key figures
- Marcus Taft
- Kenneth Forster
- William Marslen-Wilson
- Kathleen Rastle
Related topics
Seminal works
- taftforster1975
- marslenwilson1994
- rastle2004
Frequently asked questions
- Do we break 'walked' into 'walk' and '-ed' when reading?
- Evidence from priming suggests readers do decompose complex words early, and may even segment words that merely look complex, though whether this is driven by form alone or also by meaning is debated.