Words and morphemes as units for lexical access

Abstract

The representation of morphological information in memory was investigated in three experiments using French monomorphemic words that can stand as the base of derivationally related words (e.g., the word PLUME forms the base of the words PLUMER, PLUMAGE, PLUMIER, . . .). The results of Experiment 1 yielded no effect of the Cumulative Frequency of all forms sharing the base morpheme. Experiments 2a and 2b showed an effect of Morphemic Frequency (the frequency of only the derived forms), but only when Word Frequency was less frequent than Morphemic Frequency. In Experiment 3, an effect of Word Frequency was observed only when Word Frequency was more frequent than Morphemic Frequency. The results are explained in terms of independent representations for the free word form and the form used as the base of the other members of the morphological family.