Interactive-activation as a framework for understanding morphological processing

Abstract

A description is given of the main experiments that have been taken as support for the view that, in reading, a prefixed word is stripped of its prefix and lexically accessed on the basis of its stem. Since one of the most important of those experiments had been poorly executed, a new version of the same study is presented with results that are entirely consistent with the previous one. However, logical problems exist with the view that says that stems act as access codes used to gain access to the lexicon, the main ones having to do with the fact that a prefix store is required. As a result, an alternative model is favoured, namely, an interactive-activation model. Prefixed words are represented in decomposed form in this model, but no prelexical prefix-stripping is required. A detailed examination is made of the manner in which this framework is able to incorporate the previous empirical results, as well as other aspects of morphological processing.