Relations among regular and irregular morphologically related words in the lexicon as revealed by repetition priming

Abstract

Several experiments examined repetition priming among morphologically related words as a tool to study lexical organization. The first experiment replicated a finding by Stanners, Neiser, Hernon, and Hall (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1979, 18, 399-412), that whereas inflected words prime their unaffixed morphological relatives as effectively as do the unaffixed forms themselves, derived words are effective, but weaker, primes. The experiment also suggested, however, that this difference in priming may have an episodic origin relating to the less formal similarity of derived than of inflected words to unaffixed morphological relatives. A second experiment reduced episodic contributions to priming and found equally effective priming of unaffixed words by themselves, by inflected relatives, and by derived relatives. Two additional experiments found strong priming among relatives sharing the spelling and pronunciation of the unaffixed stem morpheme, sharing spelling alone, or sharing neither formal property exactly. Overall, results with auditory and visual presentations were similar. Interpretations that repetition priming reflects either repeated access to a common lexical entry or associative semantic priming are both rejected in favor of a lexical organization in which components of a word (e.g., a stem morpheme) may be shared among distinct words without the words themselves, in any sense, sharing a "lexical entry." © 1985 Psychonomic Society, Inc.