A difference in accuracy and response times between morphologically complex words and matched control words would indicate sensitivity to morphological complexity.
Morphological research differentiates between two types of morphologically complex words: inflected and derived (Carlisle, 2003).
Next, we looked at the morphological characteristics of word frequency and word transparency in derived morphologically complex words compared to matched control words.
These findings suggest that adults with low literacy skills have not yet mastered inflected and derived morphologically complex words; therefore, it is imperative to include both word types in morphological tasks for this population.
Morphologically complex words increased activation in the left inferior frontal and left superior temporal cortices versus simple words.
Morphologically complex words, half high and half low base frequency, were compared to match high and low frequency simple monomorphemic words using a lexical decision task.
Medical language, as many technical languages, is rich with morphologically complex words, many of which take their roots in Greek and Latin in which case they are called neoclassical compounds.
Specifically, reaction time to morphologically complex words (words made up of base and suffix, e.g., agree + able) typically reflects frequency of the base element (i.e., total frequency of all words in which agree appears) rather than surface word frequency (i.e., frequency of agreeable itself).
As children acquire more reading experience, morphosyntatic patterns are abstracted and become automatic, boosting the processing of morphologically complex words.
The subsequent M170 stage (N170 in EEG), on the other hand, is thought to reflect access to stored visual word forms [16], or, as suggested by recent MEG studies on morphologically complex words, access to stored representations of morpheme forms [14], [17], [18].
