Testing Morphological Productivity

Summary We have shown how an experimental technique borrowed from cognitive psychology, the Lexical Decision Task, can be used to study morphology. In particular, we have shown that native speakers of English respond positively more often to novel words of the form Xiveness than they do to words of the form Xivity , a result which was predicted from the greater productivity of the former pattern, as determined by techniques of linguistic analysis. Our finding holds true under a variety of instructions. While the result of our study is not particularly surprising, we hope that in demonstrating that the Lexical Decision Task is a reliable tool in the study of morphology we will encourage further research along the lines that we have developed.