Morphological processing in written word recognition

Abstract Morphological effects are consistently reported in written word recognition but their theoretical explanation is still debated. The paper aims to disentangle the specific role of morphological information from orthography during written word recognition. We exploit the “morphemic ambiguity” of stem-homographs, words that share formally identical but morphologically and semantically unrelated stems (e.g., mor -a , “blackberry” and mor -ire , “to die”). Two unmasked visual priming lexical decision experiments are described. The results replicate the inhibitory priming effects elicited by stem-homographs, extend it to their allomorphic variants in Italian (e.g., mor -a , and muor -e , “he/she dies”, verb form deriving from an allomorph ( muor -) of the homographic stem mor - of morire) and differentiate the stem-homographs and the stem-allomorphs inhibition from the positional effects of orthographic overlap in prime-target pairs. The pattern of data confirms the presence of mechanisms of morphological segmentation in word recognition. On the other hand, the effects fit with hypotheses of graded morphology where word stems are supposed to affect the processing of words on the basis of multiple connections between regular and irregular forms included in their inflectional paradigms and derivational families.