Much ado about morphemes

Most of the psycholinguists working on morphological processing nowadays admit that
morphemes are represented in long-term memory and the predominant hypothesis of lex-
ical access is morpheme-based as it supposes a systematic morphological decomposition
mechanism taking place during the very early stages of word recognition. Consequently,
morphemes would stand as access units for any item (i.e., word or nonword) that can be split
into two morphemes. One major criticism of this prelexical hypothesis is that the mecha-
nism can only be applied to regular and perfectly segmentable words and, more problematic,
it reduces the role of morphology to surface/formal effects. Recently, Giraudo & Dal Maso
(2016) discussed the issue of morphological processing through the notion of morphological
salience – as defined as the relative role of the word and its parts – and its implications for
theories and models of morphological processing. The issue of the relative prominence of
the whole word and its morphological components has indeed been overshadowed by the
fact that psycholinguistic research has progressively focused on purely formal and superfi-
cial features of words, drawing researchers’ attention away from what morphology really is:
systematic mappings between form and meaning. While I do not deny that formal features
can play a role in word processing, an account of the general mechanisms of lexical access
also needs to consider the perceptual and functional salience of lexical and morphological
items. Consequently, if the sensitivity to the morphological structure is recognized, I claim
that it corresponds to secondary and derivative units of description/analysis. Focusing on
salience from a mere formal point of view, I consider in the present contribution how a
decompositional hypothesis could deal with some phonological endings whose graphemic
transcriptions are various. To this end, a distributional study of the final sound [o] in French
is presented. The richness and the diversity of the distributions of this ending (in terms of
type of forms, size and frequency) reveal that paradigmatic relationships are more suitable
to guide morphological processing than morphological parsing as suggested by the lexeme-
based approach of morphology (see Fradin 2003).