Morphological salience effects of prefixes and suffixes embedded in French words
Résumé
According to the affix-chunking hypothesis, a letter search should be harder for a letter embedded in an affix compared with a non-affixed letter sequence because affixes have a functional significance. On the other hand, the decomposition hypothesis claims that derived (e.g., hunter) and pseudo-derived words (e.g., corner) are processed indifferently, lexical access being driven by affix stripping followed by the activation of the remaining stem to reach the mental lexicon. We carried a letter-search task to test these hypotheses using both prefixed (e.g., détour 'detour'), suffixed (e.g., acteur 'actor') words, compared with matched pseudo-prefixed (e.g., décor 'decor'), pseudo-suffixed (e.g., fleur 'flower') words. Decision latencies on letter targets were compared to non-affixed words for each type of affix (e.g., drogue 'drug' for détour, décor and tâche 'task' for acteur, fleur). Two different patterns of results were observed for suffixes and prefixes suggesting qualitative different processes operating during complex word recognition: while a clear 'morphological salience' effect based on genuine morphological constructions was found only in the real suffixed condition, these suffixed chunks embedded in real words did induce harder letter detection but, on the contrary, facilitated the RTs.
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