ARE MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES COMPUTED DURING WORD RECOGNITION

In the recent literature in generative morphology, it has been assumed that multimorphemic words must be characterized as having a hierarchi cal internal structure which is expressible in the form of morphologic al trees. This paper reports on an experiment which addresses the foll owing question: Are these structures relevant to complex word recognit ion? In a naming latency experiment subjects were presented with prefi xed and suffixed nonsense roots. The use of stimuli such as these allo wed for the control of real word effects such as frequency and semanti c plausibility and made it possible to systematically vary the configu ration of the morphological trees. Significant response tune differenc es were found between the morphologically illegal forms and legal conf igurations. This was taken as evidence that subjects do compute morpho logical representations. Because no differences were found between leg al left-branching structures and legal right-branching structures, it was concluded that morphological computation is not sensitive to the s erial ordering of morphemes within a complex word