Nowadays, in psycholinguistics, there are growing evidence supporting that morphologically complex words are accessed via a pre lexical decomposition mechanism before joining the mental representations coded into the lexicon (see Amenta & Crepaldi, 2012 for a review). We argue that these data have mainly focus on formal and structural aspects of complex words, leaving aside the paradigmatic dimensions of morphologically complex words. From a linguistic point of view morphological processes result from systematic form-meaning correspondances. It implies that complex words are defined by a syntactic dimension (its internal structure) and its syntagmatic dimension (its relationships with its morphologiocal family and series)(see Blevins, 2014). The second dimension is not enoughly taken into account in the interpretation of the data (and in particular the ones obtained using masked priming paradigm). Morphological interactions are nevertheless crucial for langage and reading acquisition, as well as for second language learning and finally for modeling the mental lexicon. In the present talk, we’ll present various data (coming from acquisition, learning and visual perception) about morphological processing that favor a construction perspective of morphology (as proposed by Booij, 2010) rather a decomposition one.

 

References

Amenta, S., & Crepaldi, D. (2012). Morphological processing as we know it: An analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification”. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, Article 232.

Blevins, J. P. (2014). The morphology of words (pp.152–164). In M. Goldrick, V. Ferreira & M. Miozzo (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Processing.

Booij, G. (2010). Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.