How complex simplex words can be. Send proofs to:

The complexity of simplex words 2 A series of experiments investigated components of the word frequency eect in visual lexical decision, progressive demasking, and subjective frequency ratings. For simplex, i.e., monomorphemic, nouns in Dutch, we studied the eect of the frequency of the monomor-phemic noun itself as well as the eect of the frequencies of morphologically related forms on the processing of these monomorphemic nouns. The experiments show that the frequency of the (unseen) plural forms aects the experimental measures. Nouns with high-frequency plurals are responded to more quickly in visual lexical decision, and they receive higher subjective frequency ratings. However, the summed frequencies of the formations in the morphological family of a given noun (the compounds and derived words in which that noun appears as a constituent) did not aect the experimental measures. Surprisingly, the size of the morphological family, i.e., the number of dierent words in the family, emerged as a substantial factor. A monomorphemic noun with a large family size elicits higher subjective frequency ratings and shorter response latencies in visual lexical decision than a monomor-phemic noun with a small family size. The eect of family size disappears in progressive demasking, a task which taps into the earlier stages of form identication. This suggests that the eect of family size arises at more central, post-identication stages of lexical processing. The complexity of simplex words 3 How complex simplex words can be. One of the most robust ndings in psycholinguistics is the word frequency eect (e.g.