Morphological Analysis in Word Recognition *

One of the most refined techniques for investigating morphological processing in word recognition is the variant of the lexical decision task known as repetition priming (Stanners, Neiser, Hernon, & Hall 1979). It provides a primary source of evidence, according to Henderson (1989), of facilitation between words formed from the same morpheme (i.e., morphological relatives). Generally, target (second presentation) decision latencies and error rates are reduced in the context of morphologicallyrelated primes (first presentation). Words related to the target (e.g., HEALS) can be forms that are unaffixed (e.g., HEAL), inflected (e.g., HEALED) or derived (e.g., HEALER) in either the same or different modalities (e.g., print or speech) and they can be separated by as many as fifty intervening items. Effects of morphological relatedness have been observed in the lexical decision task across a variety of languages including Serbo-Croatian (Feldman & Fowler, 1987) and Hebrew (Bentin & Feldman, 1990), English (Fowler, Napps, & Feldman, 1985; Feldman, 1991) and American Sign Language (Hanson & Feldman, 1991; see also Emmorey, 1989). In this chapter, we review evidence of morphological processing in word recognition. In the first two sections, studies of morphology that employ the repetition priming techniques are described. In section one, morphological and orthographic similarity effects are contrasted because alternative accounts of morphological effects in word recognition often minimize the role of the morpheme unit and focus on orthographic and phonological similarity of morphologically-related