Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This research is concerned with the structure and properties of the mental representations for morphologically complex words in English. In a series of experiments, using a cross-modal priming task, we ask whether the lexical entry for derivationally suffixed and prefixed words is morphologically structured or not, and how this relates to the semantic and the phonological tran^Mirency of the relationship between the stem and the affix govern + ment is semantically transparent, depart + ment is not; happy + ness is phonologically transparent, vain + ity is not). We find strong evidence for morphological decomposition, at the level of the lexical entry, for semantically transparent prefixed and suffixed forms, independent of the degree of surface transparency in the phonological relationship between the stem and the affix. Semantically opaque forms, in contrast, seem to behave like monomorphemic words. We discuss the implications of this for a theory of lexical representation and the processes of acquisition.