How is morphological decomposition achieved?

Abstract

Two experiments investigated morphological decomposition in ambiguous novel compounds such as BUSHEATER, which can be parsed as either BUS-HEATER or BUSH-EATER. It was found that subjects' parsing choices for such words are influenced by orthographic constraints, but that these constraints do not operate prelexically. Lexical decision response times for ambiguous novel compounds were found to be longer than those for non-ambiguous novel compounds such as LARKEATER. This finding supports the view that all legal lexical entries in a multimorphemic string are automatically activated during visual word recognition. The claim that morphological parsing proceeds from left to right and lexical access is automatic and obligatory is presented as the Automatic Progressive Parsing and Lexical Excitation (APPLE) model of lexical processing.