Psycholinguistic studies of word morphology and their implications for models of the mental lexicon and lexical processing

We sample from behavioral studies of visually presented inflected and derived words in the lexical decision task to describe how we understand morphologically complex word forms. We discuss how these results inform theories of the mental lexicon and lexical processing and offer some implications for how these findings might inform teaching practices for beginning readers about morphology. We focus on experimental findings pertaining to morphological regularity, whole word and morpheme frequency (including family size, entropy measures, affix frequency, and position), along with semantic transparency and morpho-orthographic parsing of words composed of several morphemes. Models of how we understand and produce morphologically complex words epitomize issues about how to capture knowledge about word patterns and the extent to which that knowledge is better characterized as general statistical patterning based on graded similarity of form and meaning as contrasted with rules that apply to linguistically defined morphemic units.