The representation of plural inflectional affixes in English: evidence from priming in an auditory lexical decision task

The representation of inflection is controversial: theories of morphological processing range from those that treat all inflectional morphemes as independently represented in memory to those that deny independent representation for any inflectional morphemes. Whereas identity priming for stems and derivational affixes is regularly reported, priming of inflectional affixes is understudied and has produced no clear consensus. This paper reports results from a continuous auditory lexical decision task investigating priming of plural inflectional affixes in English, in plural prime-target pairs such as <i>crimes→trees</i>. Our results show statistically significant priming facilitation for plural primes relative to phonological (<i>cleanse→trees</i>) and singular (<i>crime→trees</i>) controls. This finding indicates that inflectional affixes, like lexical stems, exhibit identity priming effects. We discuss implications for morphological theory and point to questions for further work addressing which representation(s) produce the priming effect.