MEMORY REPRESENTATION FOR PREFIXED WORDS

The nature of memory representation for prefixed words was investigated in a series of four experiments. The focus of the investigation was on the question of whether a prefixed word is represented in memory as two separate morphemes, prefix and stem, or whether the representation is unitary. The experiments employed three types of prefixed words. Two types had bound morphemes as stems (rejuvenate, progress), and the other type had free morpheme stems (untrue). All experiments supported the idea that at least one of the representations of a prefixed word is unitary. Other results indicated that the stem and prefix of a prefixed word are partitioned in the course of reading the word. One effect of the partitioning process is that prefixed words with free morpheme stems (untrue) access both the unitary representation and that for the stem (true). Another effect of partitioning is that words having bound morpheme stems (progress) access both their unitary memory representation and the memory representations of words with which they share a prefix. For example, the word progress would activate the representation for progress as well as the representations for words such as regress or ingress. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.