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 sug-gesting that productive, phonologically neutral, semantically transparent ‘‘Level 2’’ suffixes are ‘‘decomposed’ ’ for analysis in some cases, but that words with idiosyn-cratic, structure-changing, semantically opaque ‘‘Level 1’ ’ suffixes are not. ª 1999 Academic Press Key Words: morphology; lexical morphology; lexical access; lexical decision; mental lexicon. Historically, two competing models have characterized morphological structure during lexical access. Taft and Forsters (1975) ‘‘Affix-Stripping’’ model, argues that listeners must break words into their component mor-phemes for analysis, and that each morpheme is listed individually in the lexicon. Butterworth’s (1983) Full Listing Hypothesis maintains that words are available for recognition in the lexicon with their morphology complete. More recently, several mixed models have been proposed. For example