Reading morphemes

By studying the oral reading of morphologically decomposable pseudowords by a Finnish-speaking deep dyslexic, we searched for evidence of morphological decomposition in a morphologically rich language. As the patient's non-lexical reading was abolished, any effects obtained with pseudowords carrying morphemes were assumed to reflect the functions of the lexical route. Oral reading of bound stems in pseudowords was facilitated by the presence of a real but illegal inflectional suffix. As the constituents of these pseudowords were non-freestanding morphemes, the facilitation effect indicates that morphological parsing into stem and suffix took place during lexical access. This is also supported by the fact that the presence of morphological structure in pseudoword stimuli increased the rate of morphologically complex neologistic responses.