Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Models of word recognition and production diverge on the question of how to represent complex words. Under the morpheme-based approach, each morpheme is represented as a separate unit, while under the word-based approach, morphemes are represented in lexical networks. The word-based approach is consistent with construction morphology and recent research on the grammar network. However, while the network view of constructions has become popular in recent years, there is little computational and experimental research on this topic. In the current study, we used a computational network model (based on graph theory) and an experiment to investigate the Romance component of English morphology. Specifically, we provide evidence that complex words can be conceptualised as paths in a weighted directed network of morphemes.