Factors affecting the perceived morphenic structure of written words

Four expeirments are described which investigate readers' performance with polymorphemic words. The first two experiments examine subjects' judgments about the morphemic status of prefixes. It is found that the “ideal” prefixed word is long, has the form prefix + word , shows little orthographic or phonological evidence against prefixation, is of low frequency of occurrence, and came into the language comparatively recently. Experiments 3 and 4 examine fluent reading via a letter cancellation task. The principal finding is that there is a pseudoaffix effect: the e 's in affixes and in nonaffixes composed of the same syllables are missed more often than e 's in other syllables. A model of reading, a prominent component of which is a prelexical parser, is discussed in the light of these results.