Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The nature of morphological processing has remained acontroversial topic in psycholinguistic research. Some studies(e.g., Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004) have argued that whenwe read words like corner and talker, we automaticallydecompose them into existing morphemes like talk, corn, and-er, regardless of whether it is semantically plausible (e.g.,talker) or not (e.g., corner). Recent studies, however, havechallenged this view, by showing early semantic effects ofthe whole complex word (J ̈arvikivi & Pyykk ̈onen, 2011; L ̃oo& J ̈arvikivi, 2019; Milin, Feldman, Ramscar, Hendrix, &Baayen, 2017). Using a masked priming paradigm, the presentstudy only found effects of morphological decomposition fortrue morphological relations (e.g., talker) as well as effectsof frequency and affective properties of whole words, furtherchallenging automatic decomposition accounts. Finally, wealso report that individual differences such as participants’self-reported scholarly reading and openness to new experi-ence, affect processing.