■ ABSTRACT: Although many words are formed by more than one morphological constituent, not all of them are complex words. In the framework of morphological analysis, the term 'complex word' usually sets apart words formed by a root, a stem index and inflectional affixes, from words formed by derivation, modification or compounding. This distinction is quite simplistic since all words display a certain degree of complexity. In the literature, there are abundant claims that morphological structure plays an important role in word processing, but the level of morphological complexity is never taken into account. In this paper, we will try to contribute to the discussion of the role of morphological structure for written word processing, namely by taking into consideration the level of morphological complexity of a particular set of Portuguese derived words. We will look at the results of a priming experiment involving a lexical decision task on three sets of derivatives in -oso: the first set is formed by compositional structures; in the second, we have included words that display an allomorph of the suffix (i.e. -oso ~ -uoso); and, in the third set, we gathered words that make use of an allomorphic base. The results of this experiment confirm that derived word processing is sensitive to the morphological structure of the word and they also show that compositional structures involve lower processing costs. Hence, these results allow us to claim that the degree of morphological complexity of complex words needs to be considered for the study of written word processing.■ KEYWORDS: Morphological complexity. Visual processing. Derivation.Languages are complex systems, formed by complex modules that accommodate complex domains.1 The complexity of one of these modules, the lexicon, must be evaluated at three distinct levels: the first level concerns the assignment of a complexity index to each lexical unit; 2 the second level deals with the calculation of the complexity We assume here, like Villava and Silvestre (2015), that the lexicon contains several kinds of lexical units, namely roots, affixes, words and lexicalised phrases.
Most word association tasks (WATs) focus on semantic representations but can also illuminate other linguistic phenomena (Van Rensbergen et al., 2015). This study reports a WAT comprising 152 Portuguese verbs and their corresponding compositional deverbal action nouns ending in -ção, that aims to test whether the morphological nature of the stimulus conditions the response. The results suggest that (i) the morphological structure of the stimuli does condition the response; (ii) associations can be constrained by grammatical factors other than semantics; and (iii) L1 Portuguese speakers are more likely to respond with a word belonging to the same word family if the stimulus is a complex word.
Our paper aims to verify the role of different criteria, namely, number of syllables; number of morphological constituents; type of morphological structure and word frequency, in the visual word processing. We used a priming paradigm with a lexical decision task. The subjects were exposed to a verb prime (e.g. doar 'to donate') for 50 ms, immediately followed by the deverbal derivative in-ção (e.g. doação 'donation'). The results show that (i) there are no significant differences related to the number of morphological constituents; (ii) there are significant differences between pairs with 5syllable primes and 2-syllable or 4-syllable primes; (iii) the morphological structure of the verb yields a significant difference between identity and lexicalized pairs; and (iv) frequency triggers significant differences.
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