Lexeme-Based Model vs. Morpheme-BasedModel from Psycholinguistic Perspectives

The aim of the psycholinguistic researches that turn around morphological processing is to determine if readers are sensitive to the morphological structure of words and how this information is used during lexical access and represented in memory. Nowadays, most of the psycholinguists acknowledge the dominant role of morphological information during lexical access and the mental lexicon is envisaged as composed of concrete linguistic units of processing (orthographic, phonological, morphological and semantic units). However, scientific debates about morphological processing are mainly concentrated on where, within the architecture of the mental lexicon, morphemic units can be represented. Indeed, the precise location of such units determines their specific role in lexical access and their nature from a linguistic point of view (i.e., lexeme vs morpheme-based morphology, see Aronoff, 1994). Some studies defend the hypothesis according to which morphemes stand as access units (cf. Figure 1).