Disentangling morphosyntax from morphophonology: a re-evaluation of morphological priming

Abstract

The notion of morpheme as the smallest unit of form with a meaning has been widely abandoned by theoretical morphologists due to its empirical inadequacy (Matthews 1972, Anderson 1992, Aronoff 1993, Hall and Marantz 1993, Aronoff and Sims 2023). Instead, contemporary approaches to morphology argue for the distinction between morphosyntactic features (e.g., plural) and their phonological realisation (e.g., /-z/ in regular plurals, /-ən/ as in oxen, /-ə/ as in bacteria or ∅ in fish). However, theories of morphological processing in comprehension and production still widely adopt the notion of morpheme. In this dissertation, I build on the received wisdom in current morphological theorising to address the question of distinguishing morphosyntax and morphonology experimentally. In a series of auditory, continuous lexical decision priming experiments in Hebrew and Italian, I provide evidence that morphosyntactic features can be primed independently of (morpho)phonological similarity.