Morphological Priming by Itself:

Does the language processing system make use of abstract grammatical categories and representations that are not directly visible from the surface form of a linguistic expression? This study examines stem-formation processes and conjugation classes, a case of ‘pure’ morphology that provides insight into the role of grammatical structure in language processing. We report results from a cross-modal priming experiment examining 1 and 3 conjugation verb forms in Portuguese. Although items were closely matched with respect to a range of non-morphological factors, distinct priming patterns were found for 1 and 3 conjugation stems. We attribute the observed priming patterns to different representations of conjugational stems, combinatorial morphologically-structured ones for 1 conjugation and unanalyzed morphologicallyunstructured ones for 3 conjugation stems. Our findings underline the importance of morphology for language comprehension indicating that morphological analysis goes beyond the identification of grammatical morphemes.