THE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC REALITY OF MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL CHANGES DURING DERIVATION

The present study investigates the role of morphological structure in the organization of the English Mental Lexicon. Motivated by the Marsl en-Wilson et al. (1994) study, we investigated the representation and access of derived words in the performance of English-speaking subject s. Adopting as a point of departure Kiparsky's (1982) proposal for the organization of the lexicon, we investigated the effect of the type o f suffix (Level 1-phonological change in derivation versus Level 2-abs ence of phonological change in derivation) on the subject's on line pe rformance during word recognition and the possible implications for me ntal representation.