Morphology in Word Identification: A Word-Experience Model That Accounts for Morpheme Frequency Effects

In reading research, morphological processing and monomorphemic word identifica-tion have generally been treated separately. We describe a computational model that brings both kinds of reading together within a single framework. This model assumes that word knowledge—the orthography, phonology, and meaning of words—accu-mulates with experiences with individual words and that this knowledge is reflected in two functionally different aspects of word processing—familiarity and availabil-ity. We report simulations that demonstrate that the model accounts both for classical effects of frequency and consistency in simple word reading and for morphological effects in the reading of complex words. The morphology simulations naturally cap-ture a distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology without defining this distinction a priori. We discuss the implications of our model for general issues in reading, including individual differences in reading ability. Word identification models have largely ignored the role of morphology in lexical processing. In this article we demonstrate that a general model of word identifica-tion—that is, one that can account for a variety of simple phenomena in word iden-tification—can also handle phenomena related to morphology. In particular, we demonstrate that the traditional distinction between derivational and inflectional morphology and their associated frequency effects can be explained using a single set of computational principles.