Two experiments are reported which suggest that affixed words are not morphologically decomposed but are processed as single units. Experiment 1 involved a lexical decision task, and it suggested that lexical access does not require decomposition. Experiment 2 involved a task designed to maximize the opportunity for decomposition, but it showed that subjects processed the test items as single units. These results are discussed in relation to other evidence that has been offered to support the occurrence of morphological decomposition.

Studies of tachistoscopic word perception were reviewed under two theoretical headings: the structural approach, in which the variables of interest are linguistic relations among letters, and the lexical approach, where the interest is in the availability of words in lexical memory. The results of a recent tachistoscopic recognition study question the importance of lexical availability by finding no difference in performance between meaningful words and well-structured, pronounceable nonwords. In the present study, further comparisons between words and pronounceable nonwords were performed, and a meaningfulness effect was demonstrated. The generality of this finding was discussed, and alternative models accounting for the effect were considered. Two of these were capable of explaining structural effects as well as the meaningfulness effect: a translation model and a lexical discrimination net.

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Prior research has shown that the rate of eye blinking is inversely related to cognitive load. In the present study, as in the prior work, some subjects were never told that their eyeblinks were being monitored. However, other subjects were deliberately informed. Each group of subjects performed both easy and difficult arithmetic. Awareness of being monitored reduced the blinking rate. However, the rate was still inversely related to difficulty of the task, even for the informed subjects. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings were discussed.