Lexical decision and the number of morphemes and affixes

Abstract

There has been a considerable amount of research looking at the effects of both syllable number and syllable frequency on lexical decision and word naming times. Recently, there has also been an increased interest in morphological variables, but there have been no large scale studies that have examined the role of the number of morphemes in lexical decision for nonwords. This is partly because of the difficulty of identifying morphemes in nonwords. We present a program that identifies the presence of affixes and, therefore, can be used to count the number of morpheme-like elements in a nonword. We then used the program to measure the importance of affixes/morphemes in predicting lexical decision in nonwords. The results suggested that morphemes have an important role in lexical decision for both words and nonwords.

Responding to nonwords in the lexical decision task: Insights from the English Lexicon Project.

“…with more morphemic elements (as reflected by morphological prefixes and suffixes) took more time to reject. This is consistent with the study by Muncer et al (2013) and supports the view that morphologically complex stimuli are decomposed at an early, relatively automatic stage in visual word recognition (Rastle & Davis, 2008;Rueckl & Aicher, 2008). Our data also indicate that nonwords with more syllables were rejected more slowly, a finding that fits well with the idea that the syllable is one of the sublexical codes mediating lexical access (see , for more discussion).…”

“…Collectively, these studies suggest that morphologically complex words (and nonwords) are decomposed into morphemes during word recognition, and consequently one would expect processing time to be longer for nonwords with more morphemes. In line with this, Muncer, Knight, and Adams (2013), using data from the British Lexicon Project, reported that nonwords containing an inflectional morpheme (e.g., -S, -ER, -EST, -ED) were more difficult to reject in lexical decision than nonwords without these morphemes.…”

“…In line with this, Muncer, Knight, and Adams (2013), using data from the British Lexicon Project, reported that nonwords containing an inflectional morpheme (e.g., -S, -ER, -EST, -ED) were more difficult to reject in lexical decision than nonwords without these morphemes.…”

“…Number of affixes. This was provided by the Affix Detector program (Muncer et al, 2013), which counts the number of morphemelike elements (i.e., prefixes and suffixes) in a nonword, based on a comprehensive list of affixes listed in Fudge (1984).…”