The Interaction Between Storage and Computation in Morphosyntactic Processing

The term morphology derives from the Greek word “morphe” meaning “form,” and is generally used to refer to the study of the physical forms of entities in many scientific disciplines. In linguistics and psycholinguistics, morphology is the study of the internal structure of words which are the linguistic units that provide the main mapping between form and meaning. Word recognition has had a long and distinguished history in psycholinguistics, yet few models of lexical processing have included morphology as a level of linguistic representation. This may be because despite the ubiquity of multi-morphemic words, many current models of visual word recognition have been developed to model the mapping of orthography and phonology onto semantics—and thus have focused on morphologically simple words. Expanding the focus of research to include multi-morphemic words will significantly advance our understanding of reading by allowing us to evaluate the contribution of morphological analysis to the process of word recognition.