Morphologically structured lexical entries: A psycholinguistic study of -sa and -mi derivations in Japanese

摘要

This study investigates how derived word forms are processed in real time and how they are represented in the Japanese mental lexicon. We examined the deadjectival noun suffixes -sa and -mi using four experiments: primed and unprimed lexical decision experiments, an acceptability judgment task, and an eye-movement experiment during reading. We found whole-word and morphological constituent effects. Our findings provide support for linguistic accounts of derivational word forms that treat derivational processes as the result of combinatorial operations that associate their output with lexical stems.