Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In earlier research we argued for a morphemically decomposed account of the mental representation of semantically transparent derived forms, such as happiness, rebuild, and punishment. We proposed that such forms were represented as stems linked to derivational affixes, as in {happy} + {-ness} or {re-} + {build}. A major source of evidence for this was the pattern of priming effects, between derived forms and their stems, in a cross-modal repetition priming task. In two new experiments we investigated the prediction of this account that derivational affixes, such as {-ness} or {re-}, should also exist as independent entities in the mental lexicon, and should also be primable. We tested both prefixes and suffixes, split into productive and unproductive groups (where "unproductive" means no longer used to form new words), and found significant priming effects in the same cross-modal task. These effects were strongest for the productive suffixes and prefixes, as in prime-target pairs such as darkness/toughness and rearrange/rethink, where the overall effects were as strong as those for derived/stem pairs such as absurdity/absurd, and where possible phonological effects are ruled out by the absence of priming in phonological control and pseudo-affix conditions. We interpret this as evidence for a combinatorial approach to lexical representation.