MorphoLex: A derivational morphological database for 70,000 English words.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Lexical Processing

Background:

• Morphologically complex words are common, yet their role in visual word processing yields inconsistent findings.
• Existing research is hampered by a lack of standardized, comprehensive morphological databases, leading to methodological variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce MorphoLex-en, a large, freely available database of English word morphology.
• To investigate the impact of novel morphological variables on lexical decision latencies for complex nouns.

Main Methods:

• Creation of a database with six affix and three root variables for 68,624 English words.
• Regression analyses were performed on 4,724 morphologically complex nouns using these variables to predict lexical decision times.

Main Results:

• Root frequency and suffix length significantly facilitated lexical decision latencies.
• Higher percentage of frequent words in a suffix's morphological family inhibited latencies.
• Root family size, suffix family size, suffix P*, and suffix frequency also showed facilitatory effects.

Conclusions:

• The MorphoLex-en database provides a valuable resource for studying English morphology in visual word processing.
• Suffix length and the frequency of lexical competitors within a suffix family are crucial factors influencing word recognition speed.