On the Representation of Inflections and Derivations: Data from Spanish

The four experiments reported in this paper were designed to determine to what extent words are lexically represented in terms of their morphological structure. The experiments are carried out in Spanish, a language with rich morphological resources, using a priming paradigm and a lexical decision task. In particular, they examined the pattern of priming effects in regular inflected words with gender and in derived words, in comparison to those produced by orthographically and semantically related words, by manipulating form similarity and semantic transparency. The results showed, on the one hand, that regular inflected words produced reliable facilitatory effects which are not driven just by form relatedness (Experiments 1 and 2). On the other hand, they showed that both transparent and nontransparent derived forms produced facilitatory effects distinct from purely orthographic and semantic effects (Experiments 3 and 4.). In general, these findings suggest that morphological information is represented in the mental lexicon and may play a central role in the individuation and retrieval of lexical entries.