Abstract
The present study is a cross-linguistic investigation reporting on an on-line experimental task administered to 24 Greek-speaking and 10 Polish-speaking non-brain-damaged individuals. The questions under investigation were the following: What is the process of word recognition of complex words? What is the basic priming unit — root or word? What is the nature of mental representations? Is there an effect of morphological relatedness in the priming of complex words? and finally, what are the contents of the mental lexicon? A visual lexical decision task within a morphological priming paradigm was used, probing the subjects' word recognition of simple and of regularly and irregularly inflected verbs. The results obtained confirm the importance of morphemic relatedness in each of the two languages. They also point towards a significant language-specific effect with respect to the identification of the basic priming unit and the basic unit of representation. The present study challenges the claim for universality of certain linguistic and psycholinguistic proposals and has strong implications for the existing theories on the lexicon and mental representations.
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