Are non-semantic morphological effects incompatible with a distributed connectionist approach to lexical processing?

On a distributed connectionist approach, morphology reects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships among the surface forms of words and their meanings. Performance on lexical tasks should thus exhibit graded effects of both semantic and formal similarity. Although there is evidence for such effects, there are also demonstrations of morphological effects in the absence of semantic similarity (when formal similarity is controlled) in morphologically rich languages like Hebrew. Such Žndings are typically interpreted as being problematic for the connectionist account. To evaluate whether this interpretation is valid, we carried out simulations in which a set of morphologically related words varying in semantic transparency were embedded in either a morphologically rich or impoverished artiŽcial language. We found that morphological priming increased with degree of semantic transparency in both languages. Critically, priming extended to semantically opaque items in the morphologically rich language (consistent with Žndings in Hebrew) but not in the impoverished language (consistent