Morphological Processing of Regular Verbs in Native French Speakers

Over the past decades an extraordinary amount of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research has been carried out with the aim of understanding the nature of lexical representations and how these representations are accessed as we listen to or read words. The question that drives much of this research is whether the language processing system has access to a morpheme-based route to recognize complex words. The numerous models of lexical access that have been put forward in the literature can be categorized as taking either a morphological approach or a nonmorphological approach. Morphological models posit that the processing system can make recourse to a morpheme level of representation. The various models within the morphological approach, however, differ in hypothesizing how often the morpheme level processing route is used or made available. Whereas some morphological models claim that all complex forms are always processed through a morpheme-based route (e.g., Stockall & Marantz, 2006; Taft, 2004), others hypothesize a dichotomous system where properties such as regularity (e.g., Allen & Badecker, 2002; Clahsen, 1999), surface-form frequency (e.g., Alegre & Gordon, 1999; Baayen et al., 1997), or semantic transparency (e.g., Marslen-Wilson et al., 1994) will influence whether the morphemebased route is available to process a given word. In such dual-route processing accounts where the morpheme-based processing pathway is restricted at times, words with certain lexical properties (e.g., irregular form, high surface frequency) are believed to be accessed via a whole-form representation in lieu of a morphological representation. In contrast to morphological models, nonmorphological models propose that the morpheme as a theoretical construct should be discarded as it is not necessary to account for the ‘morphological’ relationship between words (see Hay & Baayen, 2005). Non-morphological models, such as the Parallel Distributed Processing model (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) or Distributed Connectionist Approach (Gonnerman et al., 2007) instead posit that the lexicon constitutes an associative network where surface-forms are recognized through a combination of form (orthographic and phonological) and semantic information. In other words, non-morphological models posit that lexical access is never achieved through a morpheme-based route because it is believed that no such route or representations exist.