Against longstanding assumptions in the psycholinguistics literature, we argue for a model of morphological complexity that has all complex words assembled by the grammar from lexical roots and functional morphemes. This assembly occurs even for irregular forms like gave. Morphological relatedness is argued to be an identity relation between repetitions of a single root, distinguishable from semantic and phonological relatedness. Evidence for the model is provided in two MEG priming experiments that measure root activation prior to lexical decision. Both regular and irregular allomorphs of a root are shown to prime the root equally. These results are incompatible both with connectionist models that treat all morphological relatedness as similarity and with dual mechanism models in which only regular forms involve composition.
Cayado, Dave Kenneth Tayao, Samantha Wray, Marco Chia-Ho Lai, Adam J. Chong & Linnaea Stockall
2025. Breaking down prefixed words is unaffected by morphological boundary opacity: Evidence from behavioral and MEG experiments. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 32:6 ► pp. 3162 ff.
Durand-López, Ezequiel M. & Juan J. Garrido-Pozú
2025. Experimental increase in lexical frequency improves morphological computation of Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism 29:4 ► pp. 815 ff.
2025. Arabic Aphasia Research Through a Clinical and Linguistic Lens: A Systematic Review of Current Limitations and Future Directions. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 60:4
Cayado, Dave Kenneth Tayao, Samantha Wray, Dustin Alfonso Chacón, Marco Chia-Ho Lai, Suhail Matar & Linnaea Stockall
2024. MEG evidence for left temporal and orbitofrontal involvement in breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together. Cortex 181 ► pp. 101 ff.
Chen, Phoebe, David Poeppel & Arianna Zuanazzi
2024. Meaning creation in novel noun-noun compounds: humans and language models. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 39:2 ► pp. 149 ff.
Cho, Jeonghwa, Acrisio Pires & Jonathan R. Brennan
2024. How large are root and affix priming effects in visual word recognition? Estimation from original data and a Bayesian meta-analysis. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 39:10 ► pp. 1291 ff.
Politzer-Ahles, Stephen & Bernard A. J. Jap
2024. Can the Mismatch Negativity Really Be Elicited by Abstract Linguistic Contrasts?. Neurobiology of Language 5:4 ► pp. 818 ff.
Ullman, Michael T., Talat Bulut & Matthew Walenski
2024. Hijacking limitations of working memory load to test for composition in language. Cognition 251 ► pp. 105875 ff.
Cayado, Dave Kenneth Tayao, Samantha Wray & Linnaea Stockall
2023. Does linear position matter for morphological processing? Evidence from a Tagalog masked priming experiment. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 38:8 ► pp. 1167 ff.
Royle, Phaedra & Karsten Steinhauer
2023. Neural Correlates of Morphology Computation and Representation. In Language Electrified [Neuromethods, 202], ► pp. 447 ff.
Xu, Lily, Elizabeth Solá-Llonch, Huilei Wang & Megha Sundara
2022. REPRESENTATION AND PROCESSING OF OVERTLY IDENTICAL COMPLEX FORMS IN L1 AND L2. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 44:2 ► pp. 331 ff.
Bulut, Talat
2022. Neural correlates of morphological processing: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis. Cortex 151 ► pp. 49 ff.
Rocha, Jefferson Alves da & José Ferrari Neto
2022. Acesso e representação dos substantivos flexionados em número no léxico do português brasileiro. Revista Linguagem em Foco 13:4 ► pp. 96 ff.
Smolka, Eva & Wolfgang U. Dressler
2022. The Influence of Roots and Stems on the Lexical Processing of Complex Words in German. In Developing Language and Literacy [Literacy Studies, 23], ► pp. 231 ff.
van de Vijver, Ruben & Emmanuel Uwambayinema
2022. A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon. Linguistics Vanguard 8:1 ► pp. 197 ff.
Wanner-Kawahara, Jessie, Masahiro Yoshihara, Stephen J. Lupker, Rinus G. Verdonschot & Mariko Nakayama
2022. Morphological Priming Effects in L2 English Verbs for Japanese-English Bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Yao, Yijia
2022. Exploring the Processing of Japanese Compound Verbs: Evidence from Unmasked Priming Lexical Decision Task. International Journal of Asian Language Processing 32:01
Bonin, Patrick, Betty Laroche & Alain Méot
2021. Psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words. Behavior Research Methods 54:1 ► pp. 393 ff.
Cataldo, Julia & Aniela França
2021. Um estranho no ninho. Cadernos de Linguística 2:4 ► pp. e499 ff.
Creemers, Ava & David Embick
2021. Retrieving stem meanings in opaque words during auditory lexical processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 36:9 ► pp. 1107 ff.
Durand López, Ezequiel M.
2021. Morphological processing and individual frequency effects in L1 and L2 Spanish. Lingua 257 ► pp. 103093 ff.
Kotzor, Sandra, Swetlana Schuster & Aditi Lahiri
2021. Still ‘native’? Morphological processing in second-language-immersed speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:5 ► pp. 1389 ff.
Ciaccio, Laura Anna & Harald Clahsen
2020. Variability and Consistency in First and Second Language Processing: A Masked Morphological Priming Study on Prefixation and Suffixation. Language Learning 70:1 ► pp. 103 ff.
Ciaccio, Laura Anna, Naledi Kgolo & Harald Clahsen
2020. Morphological decomposition in Bantu: a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 35:10 ► pp. 1257 ff.
Manova, Stela, Harald Hammarström, Itamar Kastner & Yining Nie
2020. What is in a morpheme? Theoretical, experimental and computational approaches to the relation of meaning and form in morphology. Word Structure 13:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Yang (杨金骉), Jinbiao, Qing Cai (蔡清) & Xing Tian (田兴)
2020. How Do We Segment Text? Two-Stage Chunking Operation in Reading. eneuro 7:3 ► pp. ENEURO.0425-19.2020 ff.
Beyersmann, Elisabeth, Deirdre Bolger, Chotiga Pattamadilok, Boris New, Jonathan Grainger & Johannes C. Ziegler
2019. Morphological processing without semantics: An ERP study with spoken words. Cortex 116 ► pp. 55 ff.
Ciaccio, Laura Anna, Gunnar Jacob & Niels O. Schiller
2019. Native speakers like affixes, L2 speakers like letters? An overt visual priming study investigating the role of orthography in L2 morphological processing. PLOS ONE 14:12 ► pp. e0226482 ff.
Coughlin, Caitlin E., Robert Fiorentino, Phaedra Royle & Karsten Steinhauer
2019. Sensitivity to Inflectional Morphology in a Non-native Language: Evidence From ERPs. Frontiers in Communication 4
Hsu, Chun-Hsien, Liina Pylkkänen & Chia-Ying Lee
2019. Effects of morphological complexity in left temporal cortex: An MEG study of reading Chinese disyllabic words. Journal of Neurolinguistics 49 ► pp. 168 ff.
Justino, Julia Sabrina & Mailce Borges Mota
2019. Processamento da morfologia flexional verbal do português brasileiro: um estudo com rastreamento ocular. Diacrítica 33:2 ► pp. 69 ff.
2019. Acquisition of L2 morphology by adult language learners. Cortex 116 ► pp. 74 ff.
Leminen, Alina, Eva Smolka, Jon A. Duñabeitia & Christos Pliatsikas
2019. Morphological processing in the brain: The good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding). Cortex 116 ► pp. 4 ff.
Royle, Phaedra, Karsten Steinhauer, Émie Dessureault, Alexandre C. Herbay & Simona M. Brambati
2019. Aging and Language: Maintenance of Morphological Representations in Older Adults. Frontiers in Communication 4
Schremm, Andrea, Mikael Novén, Merle Horne & Mikael Roll
2019. Brain responses to morphologically complex verbs: An electrophysiological study of Swedish regular and irregular past tense forms. Journal of Neurolinguistics 51 ► pp. 76 ff.
Zora, Hatice, Tomas Riad & Sari Ylinen
2019. Prosodically controlled derivations in the mental lexicon. Journal of Neurolinguistics 52 ► pp. 100856 ff.
Hung, Yi-Hui, Stephen J. Frost & Kenneth R. Pugh
2018. Domain Generality and Specificity of Statistical Learning and its Relation with Reading Ability. In Reading and Dyslexia [Literacy Studies, 16], ► pp. 33 ff.
JACOB, GUNNAR
2018. Morphological priming in bilingualism research. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21:3 ► pp. 443 ff.
Kastner, Itamar, Liina Pylkkänen & Alec Marantz
2018. The Form of Morphemes: MEG Evidence From Masked Priming of Two Hebrew Templates. Frontiers in Psychology 9
Kazanina, Nina, Jeffrey S. Bowers & William Idsardi
2018. Phonemes: Lexical access and beyond. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 25:2 ► pp. 560 ff.
2018. Compound production in agrammatism: Evidence from stroke-induced and Primary Progressive Aphasia. Journal of Neurolinguistics 47 ► pp. 71 ff.
Miozzo, Michele, Victoria P. Shuster & Simon Fischer-Baum
2018. How modality-specific is morphology?. Cognitive Neuropsychology 35:7 ► pp. 371 ff.
Neophytou, K., C. Manouilidou, L. Stockall & A. Marantz
2018. Syntactic and semantic restrictions on morphological recomposition: MEG evidence from Greek. Brain and Language 183 ► pp. 11 ff.
Olejarczuk, Paul & Vsevolod Kapatsinski
2018. The metrical parse is guided by gradient phonotactics. Phonology 35:3 ► pp. 367 ff.
Smolka, Eva & Carsten Eulitz
2018. Psycholinguistic measures for German verb pairs: Semantic transparency, semantic relatedness, verb family size, and age of reading acquisition. Behavior Research Methods 50:4 ► pp. 1540 ff.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen & David Stringer
2017. Unconventional Expressions: Productive syntax in the L2 acquisition of formulaic language. Second Language Research 33:1 ► pp. 61 ff.
Foote, Rebecca
2017. THE STORAGE AND PROCESSING OF MORPHOLOGICALLY COMPLEX WORDS IN L2 SPANISH. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 39:4 ► pp. 735 ff.
Kapatsinski, Vsevolod, Paul Olejarczuk & Melissa A. Redford
2017. Perceptual Learning of Intonation Contour Categories in Adults and 9‐ to 11‐Year‐Old Children: Adults Are More Narrow‐Minded. Cognitive Science 41:2 ► pp. 383 ff.
Morris, Joanna
2017. The Interaction Between Storage and Computation in Morphosyntactic Processing. In Neural Mechanisms of Language [Innovations in Cognitive Neuroscience, ], ► pp. 27 ff.
2016. Morphological Decomposition in Japanese De-adjectival Nominals: Masked and Overt Priming Evidence. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 45:3 ► pp. 575 ff.
Giraudo, Hélène & Serena Dal Maso
2016. The Salience of Complex Words and Their Parts: Which Comes First?. Frontiers in Psychology 7
González Alonso, Jorge, Silvia Baquero Castellanos & Oliver Müller
2016. Masked constituent priming of English compounds in native and non-native speakers. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 31:8 ► pp. 1038 ff.
González Alonso, Jorge, Julián Villegas & María del Pilar García Mayo
2016. English compound and non-compound processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers: Effects of dominance and sequential multilingualism. Second Language Research 32:4 ► pp. 503 ff.
Hall, Kathleen Currie, Claire Allen, Tess Fairburn, Michael Fry, Michael McAuliffe & Kevin McMullin
2016. Measuring perceived morphological relatedness. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 61:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Leminen, Alina, Sini Jakonen, Miika Leminen, Jyrki P. Mäkelä & Minna Lehtonen
2016. Neural mechanisms underlying word- and phrase-level morphological parsing. Journal of Neurolinguistics 38 ► pp. 26 ff.
Leminen, Alina, Minna Lehtonen, Mirjana Bozic & Harald Clahsen
2016. Editorial: Morphologically Complex Words in the Mind/Brain. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10
Lignos, Constantine & Charles Yang
2016. Morphology and Language Acquisition. In The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology, ► pp. 765 ff.
Mankin, Jennifer L., Christopher Thompson, Holly P. Branigan & Julia Simner
2016. Processing compound words: Evidence from synaesthesia. Cognition 150 ► pp. 1 ff.
2015. Towards a computational(ist) neurobiology of language:correlational,integratedandexplanatoryneurolinguistics. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30:4 ► pp. 357 ff.
Fiorentino, Robert, Stephen Politzer-Ahles, Natalie S. Pak, María Teresa Martínez-García & Caitlin Coughlin
2015. Non-linear processing of a linear speech stream: The influence of morphological structure on the recognition of spoken Arabic words. Brain and Language 147 ► pp. 1 ff.
Husband, E. Matthew & Linnaea Stockall
2015. Building Aspectual Interpretations Online. In Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing, ► pp. 157 ff.
Khwaileh, Tariq, Richard Body & Ruth Herbert
2015. Morpho-syntactic processing of Arabic plurals after aphasia: dissecting lexical meaning from morpho-syntax within word boundaries. Cognitive Neuropsychology 32:6 ► pp. 340 ff.
Krause, Helena, Sina Bosch & Harald Clahsen
2015. MORPHOSYNTAX IN THE BILINGUAL MENTAL LEXICON. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 37:4 ► pp. 597 ff.
Lieber, Rochelle
2015. Introducing Morphology,
Regel, Stefanie, Andreas Opitz, Gereon Müller & Angela D. Friederici
2015. The Past Tense Debate Revisited: Electrophysiological Evidence for Subregularities of Irregular Verb Inflection. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 27:9 ► pp. 1870 ff.
Regel, Stefanie, Andreas Opitz, Gereon Müller & Angela D. Friederici
2019. Processing inflectional morphology: ERP evidence for decomposition of complex words according to the affix structure. Cortex 116 ► pp. 143 ff.
Service, Elisabet & Sini Maury
2015. Differential recall of derived and inflected word forms in working memory: examining the role of morphological information in simple and complex working memory tasks. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8
Fiorentino, Robert, Yuka Naito-Billen, Jamie Bost & Ella Fund-Reznicek
2014. Electrophysiological evidence for the morpheme-based combinatoric processing of English compounds. Cognitive Neuropsychology 31:1-2 ► pp. 123 ff.
Nikolaev, Alexandre, Ari Pääkkönen, Jussi Niemi, Mikko J. Nissi, Eini Niskanen, Mervi Könönen, Esa Mervaala & Hilkka Soininen
2014. Behavioural and ERP effects of paradigm complexity on visual word recognition. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29:10 ► pp. 1295 ff.
Sabourin, Laura
2014. fMRI Research on the Bilingual Brain. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 34 ► pp. 1 ff.
2014. Phonological and morphological constraints on German /t/-deletions. Journal of Phonetics 45 ► pp. 64 ff.
Cohen-Goldberg, Ariel M., Joana Cholin, Michele Miozzo & Brenda Rapp
2013. The interface between morphology and phonology: Exploring a morpho-phonological deficit in spoken production. Cognition 127:2 ► pp. 270 ff.
Dye, Cristina D., Matthew Walenski, Elizabeth L. Prado, Stewart Mostofsky, Michael T. Ullman & Mark Aronoff
2013. Children's Computation of Complex Linguistic Forms: A Study of Frequency and Imageability Effects. PLoS ONE 8:9 ► pp. e74683 ff.
Marantz, Alec
2013. Verbal argument structure: Events and participants. Lingua 130 ► pp. 152 ff.
Smolka, Eva, Patrick H. Khader, Richard Wiese, Pienie Zwitserlood & Frank Rösler
2013. Electrophysiological Evidence for the Continuous Processing of Linguistic Categories of Regular and Irregular Verb Inflection in German. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25:8 ► pp. 1284 ff.
Marslen-Wilson, William D.
2012. Morphological Processes in language Comprehension. In The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, ► pp. 175 ff.
Morris, Joanna & Linnaea Stockall
2012. Early, equivalent ERP masked priming effects for regular and irregular morphology. Brain and Language 123:2 ► pp. 81 ff.
Royle, Phaedra, John E. Drury, Nicolas Bourguignon & Karsten Steinhauer
2012. The temporal dynamics of inflected word recognition: A masked ERP priming study of French verbs. Neuropsychologia 50:14 ► pp. 3542 ff.
KIM, SAY YOUNG, MIN WANG & IN YEONG KO
2011. The processing of derivational morphology in Korean–English bilingual readers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14:4 ► pp. 473 ff.
Lehtonen, Minna, Philip J. Monahan & David Poeppel
2011. Evidence for Early Morphological Decomposition: Combining Masked Priming with Magnetoencephalography. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23:11 ► pp. 3366 ff.
Leminen, Alina, Miika M. Leminen & Christina M. Krause
2010. Time course of the neural processing of spoken derived words: an event-related potential study. NeuroReport 21:14 ► pp. 948 ff.
ROYLE, PHAEDRA & DANIEL VALOIS
2010. Acquisition of adjectives in Quebec French as revealed by elicitation data. Journal of French Language Studies 20:3 ► pp. 313 ff.
Solomyak, Olla & Alec Marantz
2010. Evidence for Early Morphological Decomposition in Visual Word Recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22:9 ► pp. 2042 ff.
Lehtonen, Minna, Victor Vorobyev, Anna Soveri, Kenneth Hugdahl, Terhi Tuokkola & Matti Laine
2009. Language-specific activations in the brain: Evidence from inflectional processing in bilinguals. Journal of Neurolinguistics 22:5 ► pp. 495 ff.
Vartiainen, Johanna, Silvia Aggujaro, Minna Lehtonen, Annika Hultén, Matti Laine & Riitta Salmelin
2009. Neural dynamics of reading morphologically complex words. NeuroImage 47:4 ► pp. 2064 ff.
Zweig, Eytan & Liina Pylkkänen
2009. A visual M170 effect of morphological complexity. Language and Cognitive Processes 24:3 ► pp. 412 ff.
Bick, Atira, Gadi Goelman & Ram Frost
2008. Neural Correlates of Morphological Processes in Hebrew. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20:3 ► pp. 406 ff.
Bick, Atira, Gadi Goelman & Ram Frost
2008. Neural Correlates of Morphological Processes in Hebrew. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20:3 ► pp. 406 ff.
Hinzen, Wolfram & Michiel van Lambalgen
2008. Explaining intersubjectivity. A comment on Arie Verhagen, Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Cognitive Linguistics 19:1
Kazanina, Nina, Galina Dukova-Zheleva, Dana Geber, Viktor Kharlamov & Keren Tonciulescu
2008. Decomposition into multiple morphemes during lexical access: A masked priming study of Russian nouns. Language and Cognitive Processes 23:6 ► pp. 800 ff.
Monahan, Philip J., Robert Fiorentino & David Poeppel
2008. Masked repetition priming using magnetoencephalography. Brain and Language 106:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
2008. Co-activation of visual and emotional information by mental imagery. The Japanese Journal of Cognitive Psychology 5:2 ► pp. 119 ff.
YANG, CHARLES
2008. The great number crunch. Journal of Linguistics 44:1 ► pp. 205 ff.
Berent, Iris, Vered Vaknin & Gary F. Marcus
2007. Roots, stems, and the universality of lexical representations: Evidence from Hebrew. Cognition 104:2 ► pp. 254 ff.
Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen
2007. Are regular and irregular verbs dissociated in non-fluent aphasia?. Brain Research Bulletin 74:1-3 ► pp. 1 ff.
Fiorentino, Robert & David Poeppel
2007. Compound words and structure in the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 22:7 ► pp. 953 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Modeling declensions without declension features. The case of Russian. Acta Linguistica Academica 68:4 ► pp. 385 ff.
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