Are morphological structures computed during word recognition?

Abstract

In the recent literature in generative morphology, it has been assumed that multimorphemic words must be characterized as having a hierarchical internal structure which is expressible in the form of morphological trees. This paper reports on an experiment which addresses the following question: Are these structures relevant to complex word recognition? In a naming latency experiment, subjects were presented with prefixed and suffixed nonsense roots. The use of stimuli such as these allowed for the control of real word effects such as frequency and semantic plausibility and made it possible to systematically vary the configuration of the morphological trees. Significant response time differences were found between the morphologically illegal forms and legal configurations. This was taken as evidence that subjects do compute morphological representations. Because no differences were found between legal left-branching structures and legal right-branching structures, it was concluded that morphological computation is not sensitive to the serial ordering of morphemes within a complex word.