Morphological operations in French verbal inflection: Automatic, atomic, and obligatory

Abstract

In this article, we examined how complex words are recognized as being mediated by their morphological operations and structure. French verbal inflection is a system where the stems provide the lexical meaning and the inflectional suffixes activate the functional information by the morphosyntactic features. We investigated the morphological decomposition and inflectional suffixes processing through visual lexical decision tasks. Experiment 1 accessed general differences in the number of morphological operations regarding low and high frequencies, and regular and irregular verbal forms (e.g., jou-ent/jou-ai-ent ‘they play/played’, prend-s/pren-ai-s ‘yousg take/took’). Experiment 2 tested specific differences in the tense and agreement inflectional suffixes (e.g., jou-ons/jou-i-ons/jou-ez/jou-i-ez ‘we/youpl play/played’). Our hypothesis is that words are automatically decomposed early for morphological processing and that morphemes are later hierarchically recombined for word recognition. We found significant differences between the number of morphological operations in regular and irregular verbs in low and high frequencies; we also found significant differences in tense and agreement suffix processing with longer responses for the past tense and first plural agreement verbal forms, suggesting additive effects. Our results are supported by single-mechanism pre-lexical decompositional models; we propose a model where stems and inflectional suffixes are processed differently for lexical access and word recognition.