Words matter more than morphemes: evidence from masked priming with bound-stem stimuli

Five masked priming studies were carried in order to shed light on the processing of bound-stem words (e.g., terrin terrible). Both orthographic (e.g., termite) and unrelated (e.g., montagne ‘montain’) conditions stand as baselines for controlling morphological effects. The results of the experiments using unrelated word controls suggest that in the particular case of bound-stem words, only genuinely derived word primes (terrible) produce positive effects differing from formal overlap effects. Morphological effects are interpreted as resulting from both “morceme” and “base-lexeme” activations.