Morphological priming effect: The role of surface frequency

Two cross-modal experiments were conducted to investigate the format of lex ical representation of suffixed derived words and their stems. The results show that only low frequency suffixed words (as opposed to high frequency s uffixed words) yield a full priming effect of their stems. By contrast, a s tem (e.g., travail) does not fully prime words belonging to the same morpho logical family (e.g., travailleur), although it primes high frequency suffi xed words more than it does low frequency words. To account for these findi ngs we propose a model in which the stem and high frequency affixed words a re represented both as full forms and as decomposed morphemes while low fre quency affixed words are represented only in a decomposed form. (C) 1999 Ac ademic Press.