Measuring morphology : the tip of the iceberg? A retrospective on 10 years of morphological processing

International audienceDespite the intensive study of morphological effects with various on-line techniques such as masked priming, psycholinguistics did not manage so far to present a consensual framework, and are still divided on the nature and the locus of morphology in the mental lexicon. In this contribution, we propose to focus on three issues related to morphological effects which have not been given the right importance so far: the implications of studying morphology through nonwords, the role of frequency of the lexical items used as materials, and finally the role of a novel variable measuring the influence of formally related but morphologically unrelated word forms on processing, i.e. the pseudo-relatives. The experiment presented here provides evidence in favour of these two variables. We propose a revised model of morphological processing, sensitive to lexical (e.g. frequency) and exo-lexical characteristics of the stimuli (e.g. pseudofamily size), capable to cope with various effects induced by true morphological relatives and pseudorelatives, as well as for surface effects, such as the pseudoderivation effect. ! Over the last 40 years, multiple studies have addressed the issue of morphological processing during word recognition, trying to establish how morphologically complex words are analysed and coded in long-term memory. Until 2000, and while morphological effects have been reported in various languages (mostly English, but also Hebrew, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish or Serbo-Croatian), using different paradigms (mainly priming paradigms) and tasks (lexical decision and naming), psycholinguists were divided: on one hand, tenants of the decompositional approach (e.g. Taft & Forster, 1975), based on an affix stripping mechanism intervening during the first stages of lexical access and which can be assimilated to the morpheme-based theory of morphology propounded by linguists (e.g., Halle & Marantz, 1993); On the other hand, those who privileged a whole-word-access comparable to the word-based approach (see Chap. 3 in Haspelmath & Sims, 2010). During this period, experimental studies focused on factors determining complex word recognition and influencing processing of their surface as well as their internal structure. Among these factors, the effects o