Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Native speaker competence in English includes the ability to produce and recognize morphologically complex words such as blackboard and indestructibility &s well as novel constructions such as quoteworthiness. This paper addresses the question: H o w do subjects 'see into these complex strings? It presents, as an answer, the Automatic Progressive Parsing and Lexical Excitation (APPLE) model of complex word recognition and demonstrates how the model can provide a natural account of the complex and compound word recognition data in the literature. The APPLE model has as its core a recursive procedure which isolates progressively larger substrings of a complex word and allows for the lexical excitation of constituent morphemes. The model differs from previous accounts of morphological decomposition in that it supports a view of the mental lexicon in which the excitation of lexical entries and the construction of morphological representations IS automatic and obligatory.