Effects of family size for complex words

Schreuder and Baayen (1997) reported that in visual lexical decision, respo nse latencies to a simplex noun are shorter when this noun has a large morp hologic al family, i.e., when it appears as a constituent in a large number of derived words and compounds. The present study addresses the question o f whether the Family Size of the base word of a complex word likewise affec ts lexical processing. Six experiments are reported that show that Family S ize indeed plays a role for both inflected and derived words. Posthoc analy ses show that the effect of Family Size is driven by the semantically trans parent family members and that this effect ih further constrained by semant ic Selection restrictions of the affix in the target word. (C) 2000 Academi c Press.