Decomposition: to what extent? The case of Turkish.

It has been proposed that in agglutinative languages, lexical access of morphologically complex words must involve decomposition rather than full listing (Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1992; Hankamer, 1989). We tested this proposal in Turkish using a simple lexical decision task. Results show that multimorphemic words that consist of frequent affixes are processed as fast as monomorphemic words. This finding suggests that in languages with rich morphology, not all multimorphemic words are accessed in a decomposed form. To the extent that morphemes are in frequent use, they may induce whole-word rather than decompositional lexical access. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.