The role of phonology in processing morphologically complex words

This study investigated the role of phonology in the processing of morphologically complex words in a masked priming experiment. An English stem word target was preceded by either its derived form, sharing the phonological information with its stem (P+; healer-HEAL), or its derived form with a phonological change from the stem (P-; health-HEAL). Interestingly, both P+ and P- conditions showed comparable priming, suggesting that phonological information does not play a crucial role at least at early stages of morphological decomposition. This finding does not support the distributed connectionist approach of morphological processing, that maintains that morphemes are patterns of activation distributed across spelling, sound, and meaning. In fact, our results suggest that morphemes are explicitly represented as discrete units in the mental lexicon.