Morphological salience effects of prefixes and suffixes embedded in French words

According to the affix-chunking hypothesis, a letter search should be more difficult for a letter embedded in an affix compared with a non-affixed letter sequence because affixes have a functional significance. On the other hand, the decomposition hypothesis claims that derived (e.g., hunter) and pseudo-derived words (e.g., corner) are processed similarly, with lexical access being driven by affix stripping followed by the activation of the remaining stem to reach the mental lexicon. We conducted a letter-search task to test these hypotheses using both prefixed (e.g., détour ‘detour’), suffixed (e.g., acteur ‘actor’) words, compared with matched pseudo-prefixed (e.g., décor ‘decor’), pseudo-suffixed (e.g., fleur ‘flower’) words. Decision latencies on letter targets were compared to non-affixed words for each type of affix (e.g., drogue ‘drug’ for détour, décor and tâche ‘task’ for acteur, fleur). Our results revealed an asymmetry in the processing of suffixed versus prefixed words. While a significant facilitation effect was found for suffixed words relative to pseudo-suffixed words, no similar advantage was observed for prefixed over pseudo-prefixed words. The asymmetry in identifying letters in prefixes and suffixes is interpreted in terms of the differing functional salience of affixes in French.