Visual and Auditory Recognition of Prefixed Words

The involvement of stem storage and prefix stripping in the recognition of spoken and printed prefixed words was examined. In both an auditory and a visual lexical decision experiment, it was found that prefixed nonwords were more difficult to classify as nonwords than were non-prefixed nonwords. This difference was larger, though, when the “stem” of the nonword was a genuine stem in English (e.g., dejoice versus tejoice) than when it was not (e.g., dejouse versus tejouse). The results suggest that prefixed words are recognized via a representation of their stem after the prefix has been removed, and this is true regardless of the modality of presentation of the word. Implications are considered for the Cohort model of spoken word recognition.