Sublexical vs. supralexical representation of morphological encoding: Towards a reconciliation

Lexical morphemes such as roots, stems, inflectional and derivational affixes constitute the basic ingredients of words in languages. After 30 years of investigations, the majority of the psycholinguists nowadays agree in assigning a central role to morphology within the mental lexicon. More precisely, numerous studies have demonstrated the relevance of morphemes during reading and the earliness of morphological processing during lexical access, suggesting that morphemes are independently coded somewhere in the mental lexicon: -Either morphemic units stand as access units to word representations (Sublexical approach of Taft, 1994) -or they organize word representations in terms of morphological families (Supralexical approach of Giraudo & Grainger, 2000