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Updated: May 10, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Lexical decision and the number of morphemes and affixes
Steven J Muncer1, David C Knight, John W Adams
1Department of Psychology, University of Durham, Durham, UK. s.muncer@tees.ac.uk
Abstract:
There has been a considerable amount of research looking at the effects of both syllable number and syllable frequency on lexical decision and word naming times. Recently, there has also been an increased interest in morphological variables, but there have been no large scale studies that have examined the role of the number of morphemes in lexical decision for nonwords. This is partly because of the difficulty of identifying morphemes in nonwords. We present a program that identifies the presence of affixes and, therefore, can be used to count the number of morpheme-like elements in a nonword. We then used the program to measure the importance of affixes/morphemes in predicting lexical decision in nonwords. The results suggested that morphemes have an important role in lexical decision for both words and nonwords.
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