Does Position Matter? Differences in the Visual Identification of Stems and Affixes

Crepaldi, Rastle and Davis (2010) have demonstrated that morpheme interference effects do not emerge in morphologically structured psuedowords where a suffix precedes a stem (e.g., mentshoot is as difficult to reject as mantshoot), showing that suffix identification is sensitive to positional constraints. In this study we investigate the same issue in the other types of English morphemes, i.e., stems and prefixes. In two lexical decision experiments, we show that (i) the rejection time of reversed compounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin); and (ii) the rejection time of pseudo‑prefixed nonwords (e.g., predrink) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., pledrink), but the effect disappears when the prefix follows the stem (e.g., drinkpre took as long as drinkple to be rejected). These data extend Crepaldi et al.'s (2010) findings and show that stem identification is position‑independent, whereas affix identification is position‑specific.