The Linguistic Sophistication of Morphological Decomposition: More Than Islands of Regularity

A wealth of psycholinguistic evidence has shown that words, before being visually recognized, decompose into smaller orthographic units which may seem to correspond to, but aren't necessarily, morphemes. Such a procedure of morphological decomposition is commonly assumed to solely rely on islands of regularity - namely, statistical orthographic regularities, with no regard to the words' meaning. Building on these results, the present investigation assesses the sensitivity of decomposition to non-semantic (i.e., phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic) properties, as a way to probe the time-course of visual word processing. In showing that decomposition may also be affected by whole-word lexicality and whole-word frequency, this book proposes a novel model of lexical access, in which decomposition encompasses a multi-step mechanism that first generates multiple possible morpho-orthographic decomposition patterns of the visual stimulus, and then evaluates them in parallel in order to choose the optimal candidate for activation.