Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Morphological Processing

This publication provides an analysis of critical issues in morphological processing by examining these in a variety of languages and by using different methodologies. The issue is based on the theoretical stance that the mapping of cognitive events involved in processing morphologically complex words, should depend on the linguistic environment of the native speaker. Studies in different languages are aimed at producing converging or contrasting evidence that would allow the formulation of a general theory of morphological processing, a theory that takes into account the specific characteristics of the orthography, phonology, and morphology of each language, and shows how these constrain possible architectures and algorithms for lexical processing. Nine experimental papers are included in this book which bring evidence from Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Hebrew, and English. The papers present a variety of experimental methods such as conscious priming at various SOA's, masked priming, the monitoring of simple lexical decision, speech production in picture naming, eye movement tracking, measuring parafoveal preview benefits, and computer simulations in artificial languages. All papers suggest that lying at the intersection of orthographic, phonologic, and semantic coding, morphological structure must play a key role in the representation and processing of lexical organization.