Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Graded effects in morphological processing have beenshown in lexical decision tasks in English (e.g.,Gonnerman et al., 2007; Quémart et al., 2017).However, most studies in other languages support adecomposition view of the processing of complexwords (e.g., Longtin and Meunier, 2005). To determinewhether graded priming effects for morphologicallycomplex words can be found in other languages,Quebec French speakers participated in a cross-modallexical decision task in which auditory primes varied indegree of semantic similarity with visual targets (e.g.,bergerie-berge; infirmerie-infirme; fromagerie-fromage). Results indicate that morphological primingrequires the prime and target to be both semanticallyand phonologically similar, with semantic similaritymodulating priming effects in morphologically relatedwords. This pattern of results is similar to gradedmorphological priming previously reported for Englishand supports an emergentist view of morphologicalprocessing (Gonnerman et al., 2007).