An Investigation into the Morphological Decomposition of Suffixed Words in the Mental Lexicon

This paper uses experimental techniques and empirical data to support the notion that morphologically complex words are represented in terms of their individual morphemes in lexical memory. Two experiments are conducted to investigate this. The first experiment uses a semantic priming technique to investigate how semantic associations attached to specific derivational suffixes could indicate a meaning-based organisation of bound morphemes in memory. Whilst the results from Experiment One do imply a meaning based organisation for bound morphemes, there is also a possibility that this could be influenced by the surface frequency of transparent suffixed words. The second experiment therefore controls for surface frequency looking at semantically transparent words only. This rules out the possibility of participants either consciously or unconsciously using surface frequency as a means of identifying the word. Findings from Experiment Two show that high frequency stems elicit a faster response time than low frequency stems in suffixed words. This supports the notion of morphological decomposition. Overall, both experiments support the notion that bound morphemes are stored separately to whole words in memory, prior to lexical access. The implications of the two experiments are discussed in Section 6.1 with regards to what they mean for the bigger picture of morphological decomposition and the internal representation of affixes.