ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview about research on morphological processing and the techniques used to investigate how morphologically complex words like laughed, happiness or teacup are processed. In general, there are two ways in which the language processor could approach morphologically complex words: (a) seeing them as one unit irrespective of the meaningful component parts or (b) assembling the word out of its component parts in production and decomposing it into meaningful units during comprehension.
The most widely used technique to investigate this question is priming, in which the influence of a morphologically complex word presented before the respective base or constituent on target recognition times is measured to test if the component parts have been preactivated (i.e., accessed in the mental lexicon) at the presentation of the prime. While priming is still predominant in the field of experimental morphology, recent research has branched out with respect to techniques – also looking at morphologically complex words in sentence context rather than using isolated words. In this chapter, findings from studies using different techniques will be discussed with respect to models of morphological processing and future directions in the field will be laid out.
