In three experiments we explored the mental representation of morphologically complex words in French. Subjects were asked to perform a gender decision task on morphologically complex words that were of the same gender as their base or not. We found that gender decisions were made more slowly for morphologically complex words made from a base with…

In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and…

Contradictory data have been obtained about the processing of singular and plural nouns in Dutch and English. Whereas the Dutch findings point to an influence of the base frequency of the singular and the plural word forms on lexical decision times (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997), the English reaction times depend on the surface frequency of…