War and peace: morphemes and full forms in a noninteractive activation parallel dual-route model

Influence of the constituent morpheme boundary on compound word access

Embedded morphemes are thought to become available during the processing of multi-morphemic words, and impact access to the whole word. According to the edge-aligned embedded word activation theory Grainger & Beyersmann, (2017), embedded morphemes receive activation when the whole word can be decomposed into constituent morphemes. Thus, interfering with morphological decomposition also interferes with access to the embedded morphemes. Numerous studies have examined the effects of interfering with boundary and constituent-internal letters on morphological decomposition by comparing the effect of transposing letters at the morphemic boundary to constituent-internal letters. These studies, which report inconsistent findings, have typically used derived multi-morphemic words (e.g., cleaner), and sometimes use a control replacement letter condition that is not matched to the transposed letter conditions in terms of location. Across five experiments, we test the edge-aligned activation theory by examining the effects of replacing and transposing boundary and constituent-internal letters of compounds. Our findings suggest that replacing boundary letters interferes with access to both embedded constituents, while replacing constituent-internal letters still allows for access to the unaltered constituent, thus compensating for the interference in the altered constituent. Our findings are consistent with the edge-aligned theory with respect to letter replacement, and also imply that letter replacement must match the position of letter transposition when it is used as a control condition.

Wolf-hound vs. sled-dog: neurolinguistic evidence for semantic decomposition in the recognition of German noun-noun compounds

Animacy is an intrinsic semantic property of words referring to living things. A long line of evidence shows that words with animate referents require lower processing costs during word recognition than words with inanimate referents, leading among others to a decreased N400 amplitude in reaction to animate relative to inanimate objects. In the current study, we use this animacy effect to provide evidence for access to the semantic properties of constituents in German noun-noun compounds. While morphological decomposition of noun-noun compounds is well-researched and illustrated by the robust influence of lexical constituent properties like constituent length and frequency, findings for semantic decomposition are less clear in the current literature. By manipulating the animacy of compound modifiers and heads, we are able to manipulate the relative ease of lexical access strictly due to intrinsic semantic properties of the constituents. Our results show additive effects of constituent animacy, with a higher number of animate constituents leading to gradually attenuated N400 amplitudes. We discuss the implications of our findings for current models of complex word recognition, as well as stimulus construction practices in psycho-and neurolinguistic research.

Full-form vs. combinatorial processing of Chinese compound words: Evidence from mismatch negativity

This study examined whether Chinese spoken compound words are processed via full-form access or combination through morphemes by recording mismatch negativity (MMN). MMN has been shown to be larger for linguistic units that involves full-form access (lexical MMN enhancement) and smaller for separate but combinable units (combinatorial MMN reduction). Chinse compound words were compared against pseudocompounds, which do not have full-form representations in the long-term memory and are "illegal" combinations. All stimuli were disyllabic (bimorphemic). Word frequency was manipulated with the prediction that low-frequency compounds are more likely processed combinatorially, while high-frequency ones are more likely accessed in full forms. The results showed that low-frequency words elicited smaller MMNs than pseudocompounds, which supported the prediction of combinatorial processing. However, neither MMN enhancement nor reduction was found for high-frequency words. These results were interpreted within the dual-route model framework that assumes simultaneous access to words and morphemes.

The role of information theory for compound words in Mandarin Chinese and English

We investigate the role of information-theoretic measures for compound word reading in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and English. For each language, we report the results of two analyses: a time-to-event analysis using piece-wise additive mixed models (PAMMs) and a causal inference analysis with causal additive models (CAMs). We use the PAMM analyses to gain insight into the temporal profile of the effects of information-theoretic measures in the word naming task. For both English and Mandarin Chinese, we report early effects of the entropy of both constituents, as well as temporally widespread effects of point-wise mutual information (PMI). The CAM analyses provide further insight into the relations between lexical-distributional variables. The image that emerges from the CAM analyses is that the information-theoretic measures entropy and PMI are embedded in a carefully balanced system in which lexical-distributional properties that lead to processing difficulties are offset by lexical-distributional properties that guarantee successful communication. The information-theoretic measures have a central position in this system, and are causally influenced not only by frequency, but also by the effects of other lower-level lexical-distributional variables such as visual complexity, and phonology to orthography consistency.

Embedded stems as a bootstrapping mechanism for morphological parsing during reading development

The aim of the current research was to test the hypothesis that the activation of embedded words (e.g., the farm in farmhouse) is the starting point for the development of an abstract morphological parsing system in children's reading. To test this hypothesis, we examined the developmental trajectory of compound priming effects in third- and fifth-grade primary school children, high school students, and adults. Both children and adults participated in a masked priming lexical decision study comparing transparent compound (farmhouse-farm), opaque compound (butterfly-butter), and noncompound (sandwich-sand) word priming effects measured relative to an unrelated control. The results showed significant and equal priming effects in the two compound conditions but not in the noncompound priming condition. This robust pattern was clearly and unequivocally observed across all groups of participants. Our data suggest that even the youngest readers have already acquired the ability to rapidly and automatically identify embedded stems and are sensitive to the overall structure of compound words (full decomposition). We conclude that the activation of embedded stems provides a critical starting point in children's use of morphological information when learning to read.

Time Course of the Second Morpheme Processing During Spoken Disyllabic Compound Word Recognition in Chinese

PURPOSE

This study aimed to investigate the time course of meaning activation of the 2nd morpheme processing of compound words during Chinese spoken word recognition using eye tracking technique with the printed-word paradigm.

METHOD

In the printed-word paradigm, participants were instructed to listen to a spoken target word (e.g., "", /da4fang1/, generous) while presented with a visual display composed of 3 words: a morphemic competitor (e.g., "", /yuan2xing2/, circle), which was semantically related to the 2nd morpheme (e.g., "", /fang1/, square) of the spoken target word; a whole-word competitor (e.g., "", /lin4se4/, stingy), which was semantically related to the spoken target word at the whole-word level; and a distractor, which was semantically related to neither the morpheme or the whole target word. Participants were asked to respond whether the spoken target word was on the visual display or not, and their eye movements were recorded.

RESULTS

The logit mixed-model analysis showed both the morphemic competitor and the whole-word competitor effects. Both the morphemic and whole-word competitors attracted more fixations than the distractor. More importantly, the 2nd-morphemic competitor effect occurred at a relatively later time window (i.e., 1000-1500 ms) compared with the whole-word competitor effect (i.e., 200-1000 ms).

CONCLUSION

Findings in this study suggest that semantic information of both the 2nd morpheme and the whole word of a compound was activated in spoken word recognition and that the meaning activation of the 2nd morpheme followed the activation of the whole word.

Processing of Norwegian complex verbs: Evidence for early decomposition

We examined the processing of Norwegian complex verbs-compounds consisting of a prepositional prefix and a verbal root-to investigate the lexical decomposition of such morphologically complex compounds. In an eyetracking-while-reading study, we tested whether reading time measures were significantly predicted by a compound verb's whole-word frequency, its root family frequency, or some combination thereof. The results suggest that whole-word and root family frequencies make independent contributions to first-fixation durations. Subsequent reading time measures were better predicted by either whole-word frequency, root family frequency, or both in tandem. We interpret these results as providing support for hybrid models of lexical representation, in which complex verbs are associated with an atomic (whole-word) representation linked to the lexical entries for the compound's constituent morphemes.

Taking the Book from the Bookshelf: Masked Constituent Priming Effects from Compound Words and Nonwords

Recent evidence from visual word recognition points to the important role of embedded words, suggesting that embedded words are activated independently of whether they are accompanied by an affix or a non-affix. The goal of the present research was to more closely examine the mechanisms involved in embedded word activation, particularly with respect to the “edge-alignedness” of the embedded word. We conducted two experiments that used masked priming in combination with lexical decision. In Experiment 1, monomorphemic target words were either preceded by a compound word prime (e.g., textbook-BOOK/textbook-TEXT), a compound-nonword prime (e.g., pilebook-BOOK/textpile-TEXT), a non-compound nonword prime (e.g., pimebook-BOOK/textpime-TEXT) or an unrelated prime (e.g., textjail-BOOK/jailbook-TEXT). The results revealed significant priming effects, not only in the compound word and compound-nonword conditions, but also in the non-compound nonword condition, suggesting that embedded words (e.g., book) were activated independently of whether they occurred in combination with a real morpheme (e.g., pilebook) or a non-morphemic constituent (e.g., pimebook). Priming in the compound word condition was greater than in the two nonword conditions, indicating that participants benefited from the whole-word representation of real compound words. Constituent priming occurred independently of whether the target word was the first or the second embedded constituent of the prime (e.g., textbook-BOOK vs. textbook-TEXT). In Experiment 2, significant priming effects were found for edge-aligned embedded constituents (e.g., pimebook-BOOK), but not for mid-embedded (e.g., pibookme-BOOK) or the outer-embedded constituents (e.g., bopimeok-BOOK), suggesting that edge-alignedness is a key factor determining the activation of embedded words.

Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon

Current evidence suggests that there is a difference between the representations of multimorphemic words in production and perception. In perception, it is widely believed that both whole-word and root representations exist, while in production there is little evidence for whole-word representations. The present investigation demonstrates that whole-word and root frequency independently predict the duration of words suffixed with -ing, -ed, and -s, which reveals that both root and word representations play a role in the production of inflected English words. In a second line of analysis, we find that the number of inflected phonological neighbours independently predicts the duration of monomorphemic words, which extends these results and suggests that whole-word representations exist at the lexical level. Together these results suggest that both root and word representations of inflected words are stored in the lexicon and are relevant for the production of both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words.

Association norms for German noun compounds and their constituents

We present a collection of association norms for 246 German depictable compound nouns and their constituents, comprising 58,652 association tokens distributed over 26,004 stimulus-associate pair types. Analyses of the data revealed that participants mainly provided noun associates, followed by adjective and verb associates. In corpus analyses, co-occurrence values for compounds and their associates were below those for nouns in general and their associates. The semantic relations between compound stimuli and their associates were more often co-hyponymy and hypernymy and less often hyponymy than for associations to nouns in general. Finally, we found a moderate correlation between the overlap of the associations to compounds and their constituents and the degree of semantic transparency. These data represent a collection of associations to German compound nouns and their constituents that constitute a valuable resource concerning the lexical semantic properties of the compound stimuli and the semantic relations between the stimuli and their associates. More specifically, the norms can be used for stimulus selection, hypothesis testing, and further research on morphologically complex words. The norms are available in text format (utf-8 encoding) as supplemental materials.

Word formation is aware of morpheme family size

Words are built from smaller meaning bearing parts, called morphemes. As one word can contain multiple morphemes, one morpheme can be present in different words. The number of distinct words a morpheme can be found in is its family size. Here we used Birth-Death-Innovation Models (BDIMs) to analyze the distribution of morpheme family sizes in English and German vocabulary over the last 200 years. Rather than just fitting to a probability distribution, these mechanistic models allow for the direct interpretation of identified parameters. Despite the complexity of language change, we indeed found that a specific variant of this pure stochastic model, the second order linear balanced BDIM, significantly fitted the observed distributions. In this model, birth and death rates are increased for smaller morpheme families. This finding indicates an influence of morpheme family sizes on vocabulary changes. This could be an effect of word formation, perception or both. On a more general level, we give an example on how mechanistic models can enable the identification of statistical trends in language change usually hidden by cultural influences.

ERPs and morphological processing: the N400 and semantic composition

Both behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests that fluent readers decompose morphologically complex words into their constituent parts. Previous event-related potential (ERP) research has been equivocal with regard to whether the N400 component indexes morphological decomposition or the integration of the products of decomposition, a process called semantic composition. In a visual lexical decision task with college students, we recorded ERPs to a well-controlled set of words and nonwords made up of bound morphemes (discern, predict; disject, percern) or free morphemes (cobweb, earring; cobline, bobweb) and monomorphemic control words and nonwords (garlic, minnow; gartus, buzlic). For each of the three morphological types, participants were faster to respond to words than to nonwords. Furthermore, for each of the three morphological types, the amplitude of the N400 was more negative to nonwords than to matched words, an effect indicating that the N400 is more sensitive to the lexicality of the whole stimulus than to the meaningfulness of the constituent parts of the stimulus. The N400 lexicality effect was not significantly different across the three morphological types. To our knowledge, this is the first ERP study to directly compare the processing of printed sets of words composed of bound and free morphemes and monomorphemic control stimuli in order to explore the relative sensitivity of the N400 to morphological decomposition (i.e., the status of the parts) and semantic composition (i.e., the status of the whole). Our findings are consistent with an interpretation of the N400 as an index of a process of semantic composition.

Manipulations of word frequency reveal differences in the processing of morphologically complex and simple words in German

We tested current models of morphological processing in reading with data from four visual lexical decision experiments using German compounds and monomorphemic words. Triplets of two semantically transparent noun-noun compounds and one monomorphemic noun were used in Experiments 1a and 1b. Stimuli within a triplet were matched for full-form frequency. The frequency of the compounds' constituents was varied. The compounds of a triplet shared one constituent, while the frequency of the unshared constituent was either high or low, but always higher than full-form frequency. Reactions were faster to compounds with high-frequency constituents than to compounds with low-frequency constituents, while the latter did not differ from the monomorphemic words. This pattern was not influenced by task difficulty, induced by the type of pseudocompounds used. Pseudocompounds were either created by altering letters of an existing compound (easy pseudocompound, Experiment 1a) or by combining two free morphemes into a non-existing, but morphologically legal, compound (difficult pseudocompound, Experiment 1b). In Experiments 2a and 2b, frequency-matched pairs of semantically opaque noun-noun compounds and simple nouns were tested. In Experiment 2a, with easy pseudocompounds (of the same type as in Experiment 1a), a reaction-time advantage for compounds over monomorphemic words was again observed. This advantage disappeared in Experiment 2b, where difficult pseudocompounds were used. Although a dual-route might account for the data, the findings are best understood in terms of decomposition of low-frequency complex words prior to lexical access, followed by processing costs due to the recombination of morphemes for meaning access. These processing costs vary as a function of intrinsic factors such as semantic transparency, or external factors such as the difficulty of the experimental task.

Connectivity, not frequency, determines the fate of a morpheme

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words and therefore represent a natural unit to study the evolution of words. To analyze the influence of language change on morphemes, we performed a large scale analysis of German and English vocabulary covering the last 200 years. Using a network approach from bioinformatics, we examined the historical dynamics of morphemes, the fixation of new morphemes and the emergence of words containing existing morphemes. We found that these processes are driven mainly by the number of different direct neighbors of a morpheme in words (connectivity, an equivalent to family size or type frequency) and not its frequency of usage (equivalent to token frequency). This contrasts words, whose survival is determined by their frequency of usage. We therefore identified features of morphemes which are not dictated by the statistical properties of words. As morphemes are also relevant for the mental representation of words, this result might enable establishing a link between an individual's perception of language and historical language change.

The multiple pronunciations of Japanese kanji: a masked priming investigation

English words with an inconsistent grapheme-to-phoneme conversion or with more than one pronunciation ("homographic heterophones"; e.g., "lead"-/lεd/, /lid/) are read aloud more slowly than matched controls, presumably due to competition processes. In Japanese kanji, the majority of the characters have multiple readings for the same orthographic unit: the native Japanese reading (KUN) and the derived Chinese reading (ON). This leads to the question of whether reading these characters also shows processing costs. Studies examining this issue have provided mixed evidence. The current study addressed the question of whether processing of these kanji characters leads to the simultaneous activation of their KUN and ON reading, This was measured in a direct way in a masked priming paradigm. In addition, we assessed whether the relative frequencies of the KUN and ON pronunciations ("dominance ratio", measured in compound words) affect the amount of priming. The results of two experiments showed that: (a) a single kanji, presented as a masked prime, facilitates the reading of the (katakana transcriptions of) their KUN and ON pronunciations; however, (b) this was most consistently found when the dominance ratio was around 50% (no strong dominance towards either pronunciation) and when the dominance was towards the ON reading (high-ON group). When the dominance was towards the KUN reading (high-KUN group), no significant priming for the ON reading was observed. Implications for models of kanji processing are discussed.

From gr8 to great: Lexical Access to SMS Shortcuts

Many contemporary texts include shortcuts, such as cu or phones4u. The aim of this study was to investigate how the meanings of shortcuts are retrieved. A primed lexical decision paradigm was used with shortcuts and the corresponding words as primes. The target word was associatively related to the meaning of the whole prime (cu/see you - goodbye), to a component of the prime (cu/see you - look), or unrelated to the prime. In Experiment 1, primes were presented for 57 ms. For both word and shortcut primes, responses were faster to targets preceded by whole-related than by unrelated primes. No priming from component-related primes was found. In Experiment 2, the prime duration was 1000 ms. The priming effect seen in Experiment 1 was replicated. Additionally, there was priming from component-related word primes, but not from component-related shortcut primes. These results indicate that the meanings of shortcuts can be retrieved without translating them first into corresponding words.

Hesitation patterns in third grade children's derived word productions

Hesitations have been considered to serve both cognitive and linguistic functions. This study presents analyses of children's hesitations while producing English derived words with the suffix -ity. Two questions were considered: Do children's linguistic skills influence their use and frequency of hesitations when producing derived words, and do children's use of hesitations vary as a function of word frequency. Eight real words derived with the suffix -ity were produced by 20 third grade children and analysed for different hesitation types. Four of the target words were high in lexical frequency, and four were low in lexical frequency. Results indicated varying hesitation patterns based upon stress accuracy skill. Children with good stress accuracy skills tended to produce false starts, whereas children with poor stress accuracy skills tended to produce glottal stops and intra-word pauses. Word frequency had a specific effect only for children with good stress accuracy skills.

Are regular and irregular verbs dissociated in non-fluent aphasia?

The cognitive mechanisms and neuroanatomical substrates used by the brain to effortlessly generate morphologically complex words (write + ing --> writing) are little understood. The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, including Broca's area) is often implicated as being involved, although its specific role is unclear. Data from brain damaged individuals, particularly those with Broca's aphasia, are often used as evidence to support or refute various theoretical perspectives. Typically, performance on two types of morphologically complex verbs, regulars (walk-walked, slip-slipped) and irregulars (sing-sang, sleep-slept) is contrasted for evidence of single or double dissociations. The question of how Broca's aphasic individuals dissociate in their production of inflectional morphology is important to our understanding of how the brain is organized to compute morphologically complex words. This article is a synthesis of research studies investigating the production of morphologically complex regular and irregular verbs in individuals with Broca's aphasia. The question being asked is if there is a robust and consistent dissociation, and if this dissociation can be tied to lesions of the left frontal lobe. This meta-analysis of 75 patients failed to show a single consistent dissociation pattern and over half the datasets had no significant difference between regulars and irregulars. There was also no relationship of any performance pattern to frontal lobe lesions, highlighting the difficulty of identifying any single neuroanatomical lesion for regular-irregular verb production deficits. The implications for various theoretical and neuroanatomical hypotheses are discussed. The role of neuropsychological dissociations in constraining hypothesis of normal neuroanatomical organization is evaluated.

Getting to the meaning of the regular past tense: evidence from neuropsychology

Neuropsychological impairments of English past tense processing inform a key debate in cognitive neuroscience concerning the nature of mental mechanisms. Dual-route accounts claim that regular past tense comprehension deficits reflect a specific impairment of morphological decomposition (e.g., jump + ed), disrupting the automatic comprehension of word meaning accessed via the verb stem (e.g., jump). Single-mechanism accounts claim that the deficits reflect a general phonological impairment that affects perception of regular past tense offsets but which might preserve normal activation of verb semantics. We tested four patients with regular past tense deficits and matched controls, using a paired auditory semantic priming/lexical decision task with three conditions: uninflected verbs (hope/wish), regular past tense primes (blamed/accuse), and irregular past tense primes (shook/tremble). Both groups showed significant priming for verbs with simple morphophonology (uninflected verbs and irregular past tenses) but the patients showed no priming for verbs with complex morphophonology (regular past tenses) in contrast to controls. The findings suggest that the patients are delayed in activating the meaning of verbs if a regular past tense affix is appended, consistent with a dual-route account of their deficit.

Some neurophysiological constraints on models of word naming

The pronunciation of irregular words in deep orthographies like English cannot be specified by simple rules. On the other hand, the fact that novel letter strings can be pronounced seems to imply the existence of such rules. These facts motivate dual-route models of word naming, which postulate separate lexical (whole-word) and non-lexical (rule-based) mechanisms for accessing phonology. We used fMRI during oral naming of irregular words, regular words, and nonwords, to test this theory against a competing single-mechanism account known as the triangle model, which proposes that all words are handled by a single system containing distributed orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes rather than word codes. Two versions of the dual-route model were distinguished: an 'exclusive' version in which activation of one processing route predominates over the other, and a 'parallel' version in which both routes are equally activated by all words. The fMRI results provide no support for the exclusive dual-route model. Several frontal, insular, anterior cingulate, and parietal regions showed responses that increased with naming difficulty (nonword > irregular word > regular word) and were correlated with response time, but there was no activation consistent with the predicted response of a non-lexical, rule-based mechanism (i.e., nonword > regular word > irregular word). Several regions, including the angular gyrus and dorsal prefrontal cortex bilaterally, left ventromedial temporal lobe, and posterior cingulate gyrus, were activated more by words than nonwords, but these 'lexical route' regions were equally active for irregular and regular words. The results are compatible with both the parallel dual-route model and the triangle model. 'Lexical route' regions also showed effects of word imageability. Together with previous imaging studies using semantic task contrasts, the imageability effects are consistent with semantic processing in these brain regions, suggesting that word naming is partly semantically-mediated.

Lexicality, morphological structure, and semantic transparency in the processing of German ver-verbs: The complementarity of on-line and off-line evidence

Two types of experiments investigate the visual on-line and off-line processing of German ver-verbs (e.g., verbittern 'to embitter'). In Experiments 1 and 2 (morphological priming), latency patterns revealed the existence of facilitation effects for the morphological conditions (BITTER-VERBITTERN and BITTERN-VERBITTERN) as compared to the neutral conditions (SAUBER-VERBITTERN and SAUBERN-VERBITTERN). In Experiments 3 and 4 (rating tasks) participants had to judge whether the target (VERBITTERN) "comes from," "contains a form of," or "contains the meaning of" the root (BITTER) or the root+en substring (BITTERN). Taken together, these studies revealed the combined influence of the three factors of lexicality (real word status), morphological structure, and semantic transparency.

The impact of semantic transparency of morphologically complex words on picture naming

We examined the contribution of semantic similarity to morphological priming effects, using the immediate (Exp. 1 and 3) and the delayed variant (Exp. 2) of picture-word interference. Distractor words were either compounds morphologically related to the picture name, but differing with respect to their semantic transparency (hummingbird, jailbird (Exp. 1); butterfly, butter dish (Exp. 3)), or form-related non-compound words (e.g., trombone). All three experiments revealed strong facilitation of picture naming due to morphologically related distractors. Form-related distractors facilitated picture naming in the immediate variant only, and to a lesser degree than compounds. Interestingly, the size of the morphemic effect was almost identical for semantically transparent and opaque complex words, which suggests that they share morphemic representations. These results suggest that morphological complexity in speech production is coded at the level of form representations, independent of semantic transparency.

Processing of inflected adjectives

Processing of inflected Serbian verbs was investigated in two lexical decision experiments. Specifically, the following issues were addressed: a. does the adjectival system contain syntactic functions and meanings, and b. are adjectival gender and case cognitively relevant properties. Each of the above issues could be expressed in terms of alternative equations that generate the amount of information carried by inflected form of an adjective. The informational values were correlated with mean reaction time to inflected adjectival forms. The outcome of the two experiments indicated that number of syntactic functions/meanings is the obligatory term in the equation that generates the amount of information carried by an adjectival inflected form. However, unlike nouns, where the amount information was specified in terms of ratio between a. sum of frequencies of inflected cases encompassed by a given inflected form and b. sum of its functions/ meanings, equation for adjectives includes sum of frequency by number of syntactic functions/meanings ratios for cases encompassed by a given inflected adjectival form. This, on the other hand, suggests that cognitive system when processing inflected adjectives is to some extent sensitive to adjectival case. It was also demonstrated that cognitive system is not sensitive to adjective gender.

English derivational suffix frequency and children's stress judgments

Considering the importance of word and stem frequency in the adult lexical processing literature, and the effect of input frequency on children's acquisition of words (Tardif, Shatz, and Naigles, 1997), it was hypothesized that children's acquisition of English morphologically conditioned stress alternations would be affected by the frequency with which children were exposed to different stress-changing suffixes (e.g., -tion, -ity, and -ic). Study 1 determined the proportional representation of suffixes in a children's literature corpus, thereby allowing the suffix variable to be established. Study 2 empirically examined the effect of suffix frequency on school-aged children's judgments of primary stress placement. Findings suggest that age and suffix frequency both play a role in children's awareness of stress placement.

Morphological priming: the role of prime duration, semantic transparency, and affix position

Patterns of facilitation in three lexical decision studies reveal several properties of morphologically complex words that influence processing. In one study, effects of morphological (VOWED-VOW) similarity are contrasted with effects of either semantic (PLEDGE-VOW) or orthographic (VOWEL-VOW) similarity at two prime durations to show the distinctiveness of morphological processing. In a second study, we compare morphologically complex forms that are semantically transparent (CASUALLY-CASUALNESS) with opaque forms (CASUALTY-CASUALNESS) and show that opaque relatives are more similar to VOWEL-VOW type pairs than to transparent relatives. In the third study, we examine facilitation for complex targets (CALCULATION) preceded by prefixed (MISCALCULATE) and suffixed (CALCULATOR) relatives and show that the position of the base morpheme influences processing under cross-modal but not under purely visual presentation conditions. Taken collectively, under comparable presentation conditions, semantic transparency but not base morpheme position constrains morphological processing.