The distributional properties of prefixes influence lexical decision latencies

Abstract

Abstract Morphological processing has been extensively studied in English and European languages, but there is a growing interest in extending the research to other languages. Here we examined Malay, an Austronesian language that is morphologically rich. We investigated the effects of morphological constituents on lexical decisions for prefixed words. Specifically, we explored whether readers are sensitive to any distributional properties of the prefix and root morphemes. Variables investigated included length and family size for both prefixes and roots, as well as number of allomorphs, consistency, and productivity for prefixes. Decision latencies were collected for 1,280 Malay words of various morphological structures. Data from the 640 prefixed words were analyzed in a series of GAMM models. We observed a facilitative effect of root family size and an effect of several distributional properties of prefixes on decision latencies after accounting for word frequency and length. Furthermore, a larger interaction between frequency and several distributional properties of prefixes was found for words with three-letter prefixes than for those with two-letter prefixes. These findings provide insight into the types of distributional properties to which Malay readers are sensitive in multimorphemic words.