Morphological facilitation following prefixed but not suffixed primes: lexical architecture or modality-specific processes?

Morphological facilitation was examined in immediate (Experiment 1) and long-term (Experiment 2) lexical decision with English materials. For the target (payment), related primes consisted of base-alone (pay), affix-plus-base (prepay), or base-plus-affix (payable) combinations, thereby defining position of overlap. In addition, modality of presentation varied for primes and targets (Experiment 1). At short lags, the advantage for prepay-payment over payable-payment type pairs was significant when primes were visual (V) and targets were auditory (A), marginal under AV conditions, and nonexistent under VV conditions. At long lags, the magnitude of VV did not vary with position of overlap. Morphological facilitation was stable across changes in modality following prefixed and simple forms, reflecting lexical architecture. By contrast, the absence of facilitation following suffixed primes presented cross-modally implicates modality-specific processing.