The morphological family size effect and morphology

Abstract

It has been reported that in visual lexical decision response latencies to simplex nouns are shorter when these nouns have large morphological families, i.e., when they appear as constituents in large numbers of derived words and compounds. This study presents the results of four experiments that show that verbs have a Family Size effect independently of nominal conversion alternants, that this effect is a strict type frequency effect andnot a token frequency effect, that the effect is co-determined by the morphological structure of the inflected verb, and that it occurs irrespective of the orthographic shape of the base word.