Lexical morphology and lexical access

Research on morphology in word recognition has been plagued by conflicting results (McQueen & Cutler, 1998, give a recent review). Some findings suggest that words are accessed as full forms, while others suggest that words are accessed in terms of their component morphemes. The answer may lie in the properties of the affixes themselves: Kiparsky's (1982) Lexical Phonology and Morphology assigns affixes in English to different "levels" of attachment, based on their productivity, order of attachment, and phonological interaction with roots. We present data suggesting that productive, phonologically neutral, semantically transparent "Level 2" suffixes are "decomposed" for analysis in some cases, but that words with idiosyncratic, structure-changing, semantically opaque "Level 1" suffixes are not.