Experimental and psycholinguistic approaches to studying derivation

This chapter provides a critical overview of experimental and computational research on the pro-cessing and representation of derived words. It begins with an introductory section addressing methodological issues: The pros and cons of various popular experimental tasks, issues with respect to the selection of materials, as well as the relevance of experimental research for morphological theory. The main section reviews two opposing classes of theories for the organization of the mental lexicon: theories building on the dictionary metaphor, and theories seeking to understand lexical processing without a mental dictionary and without theoretical constructs such as the morpheme.