The Relationship between Lexical and Syntactic Processing

Abstract

Lexical and syntactic processes are usually regarded as separate sub-systems of the language processing system. We re-examine the autonomy of these processes, given a mental lexicon that is morphemically decomposed, in 3 self-paced reading experiments. Although inflectional affixes have a syntactic role and derivational affixes have a lexical role, there were similar patterns of processing for both types of affix (Experiments 1 and 3). This suggests that there is a common combinatorial process at both levels of the system. Using novel and established morphologically complex words, we varied wordinternal factors together with sentence level constraints (Experiment 2). Both sentence-level constraints and wordinternal factors had parallel effects on the processing of novel and established words. Overall, the results indicate that the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing may be non-autonomous when morphological composition is taken into consideration.