Graded morphological processing in French

Abstract

Understanding how morphologically complex words are processed is crucial to understanding the structure of the mental lexicon. Decomposition accounts of morphological processing receive the most support within the psycholinguistic literature, although some of these accounts have difficulty with words where the morphological status is unclear (e.g., hardly; grocer). These issues of murky morphology may be better accounted for by learning models of processing such as emergentist or discriminative models that derive morphological relationships from semantic and phonologically consistent regularities among words. Graded morphological priming effects have been demonstrated in English which support learning accounts of lexical processing (Gonnerman et al., 2007; Quémart et al., 2018). In this study, we examine semantic similarity and processing of morphologically complex words in Quebec French to determine whether graded effects can be found in other languages, and in particular in a language with a richer morphological system than English. Results reveal graded semantic similarity and graded morphological priming effects supporting an emergentist account of lexical processing.