Morphological facilitation following prefixed but not suffixed primes: Lexical architecture or modality-specific processes?

Morphological facilitation was examined in immediate (Experiment 1) and lon g-term (Experiment 2) lexical decision with English materials. For the targ et (payment), related primes consisted of base-alone (pay), affix-plus-base (prepay), or base-plus-affix (payable) combinations, thereby defining posi tion of overlap. In addition, modality of presentation varied for primes an d targets (Experiment 1). At short lags, the advantage for prepay-payment o ver payable-payment type pairs was significant when primes were visual (V) and targets were auditory (A), marginal under AV conditions, and nonexisten t under VV conditions. At long lags, the magnitude of VV did not vary with position of overlap. Morphological facilitation was stable across changes i n modality following prefixed and simple forms, reflecting lexical architec ture. By contrast, the absence of facilitation following suffixed primes pr esented cross-modally implicates modality-specific processing.