Morphological productivity and the decomposition of complex words

Abstract

This thesis addresses the role that morphological productivity plays in the process of morphological decomposition. Understanding the role of productivity is crucial, as previ-ous literature has shown words to be decomposable across-the-board into their morphem-ic parts or employing both decomposition into morphemic parts and whole-word storage. Previous research has also shown that in a masked priming experiment, morphologically complex words are decomposed in terms of morphological parts (e.g., cleaner; clean + -er) and potential morphological parts (e.g., corner; corn + -er). However, the extent to which properties beyond morpho-orthographic segmentation, such as productivity, con-strains this process remains unclear. In a masked priming experiment, we examined the role of productivity in morpholog-ically complex word processing, testing whether both morphologically complex words with productive (e.g., -ness) and unproductive (e.g., -ity) suffixes are decomposed into morpheme-level constituents or whether only productive suffixes are decomposed while unproductive are stored. Our response time results did not support morpheme-level pro-cessing, as all of our conditions showed similar priming results. However, our accuracy results argue for a decomposition process sensitive to potential morphologically-complex and potential morphological words. We conclude based on the response time and accuracy differences that the priming effects in our experiment were not modulated by our productivity manipulation. Therefore, productivity is not a factor that constrains the ini-tial stages of lexical access.