Future Morphology? Summary of Visual Word Identification Effects Draws Attention to Necessary Efforts in Understanding Morphological Processing

摘要

This commentary discusses the insights and suggestions of a review by Amenta and Crepaldi (2012) in Frontiers in Psychology. The authors have diagnosed a controversial accumulation of findings in the field of visual word identification and, hence, have provided an overview of the field with the aim to separate substantial effects from findings that need further confirmation. The authors aim to provide a broad basis for theory development. Amenta and Crepaldi (2012) are the first to attempt a comprehensive psycholinguistic review of the major forms of word formation, namely inflection, derivation, and compounding. The authors summarize 17 robust experimental effects and suggest that “any theory should be able to explain” this set of experimental effects (cf. abstract). Thus, the listed effects are supposed to help to decide which among competing theories have more explanatory power and might thus be considered scientifically superior.