The reality of hierarchical morphological structure in multimorphemic words

Abstract

This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.