Morpheme stripping in the lexicon and in the sublexicon

The storage (and processing) of inflected verbs is a strongly debated issue in psycholinguistics. Some authors suggest that inflected verbs are stored as units (i.e. with the bound morpheme) in the lexicon (Stemberger & MacWhinney, 1986, Bertram at al, 2000), and bring as evidence the presence of strong frequency effects in lexical decision tasks with inflected verbs. Other authors suggest that inflected verbs are decomposed in stems and affixes in perception and generated by the application of a rule in production, for instance +ed, +s in English (Pinker & Ullman, 2001), and bring as evidence phenomena such as hyper-regularizations. Some authors go further in this direction as suggest that a morpheme stripping process takes place sublexically, at least in reading (Grainger & Ziegler, 2011). A set of 3 experiments was conducted in order to investigate these phenomena.