This paper examines several ways in which the morphological structure of words might enter their lexical representation or processing. It addresses possibilities such as representational economy, efficiency of processing, and module-external motivations. (55 references) (MDM)

Reviews research that supports the view that readers strip prefixed words of their prefix and lexically assess the words on the basis of their stem. An experiment using real and nonword stems found that nonwords that are considered to be stem morphemes are treated as being more wordlike than those that are not. (36 references) (MDM)

Two experiments assessed the performance of subjects on prefixed nonwords resulting from the incorrect combination of a prefix and a real word in Italian. The results support the view that prefixes may be represented as units of access or representation in the mental lexicon. (41 references) (MDM)

The role of morphological, semantic, and form-based factors in the early stages of visual word recognition was investigated across different SOAs in a masked priming paradigm, focusing on English derivational morphology. In a first set of experiments, stimulus pairs co-varying in morphological decomposability and in semantic and orthographic…

Two experiments with French university students investigated whether the visual recognition of short prefixed and suffixed words was affected by their morphological structure. Results indicated that encoding times were sensitive to the lexical status of the unit, with a significant benefit occurring only when the subword unit corresponded to the…

Two experiments investigated the processing and representation of Dutch compound words as a function of their semantic transparency. The results provided clear evidence for the sensitivity of the lexical processing system to morphological complexity, independent of semantic transparency. (50 references) (MDM)

Three experiments used the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. The results indicated that, when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. (41 references) (MDM)