Seeing stems everywhere and being blind to affixes

Crepaldi, Rastle and Davis (2010) have shown that suffix identification is sensitive to positional constraints. In this study we demonstrate that: (i) 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); (ii) the rejection time of reversed compounds (e.g., applepine) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., baconpine); (iii) shifted‑halves pseudo‑compounds (e.g., fireback) prime their corresponding compound words (backfire), whereas shifted‑halves simple nonwords (e.g., rickmave) do not prime their corresponding simple word (maverick). These data allow us to generalize Crepaldi et al.'s (2010) findings and show that stem identification is position‑independent, whereas affix identification is position‑specific.