Cross-linguistic perspectives on morphological processing: An introduction

The appreciation that morphological factors are essential building blocks in anymodel of lexical organisation is nowwidely accepted.Morphological structure is a necessary component in natural languages. It introduces into a language, elements of complexity as well as factors of redundancy. From an historical perspective, the classical models of visual word recognition that were laid out two or three decades ago, regarded lexical processing as an interplay between orthographic, phonological, and semantic information (e.g., Forster, 1976; Morton, 1969; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; and see Frost, 1998, for a review). Interestingly, the study of morphology has evolved in parallel to these models with few attempts to generate a general theory of word recognition that takes morphological structure into account. One important motivation for pursuing such a theory stems from the abundant research conducted in different languages. Morphological complexity is created in different languages according to different principles. Thus, our models of representation, storage and processing of words in a language should be tuned to these principles. It is in this perspective that a group of researchers investigating morphological processing were brought together in the summer of 1999 for a workshop in Aix-en-Provence, France. The theme of this workshop was ‘‘Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Morphological Processing’’. The papers presented in the workshop, which form the basis for the present special issue, brought evidence from Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese, and English. We mention English last