The positional encoding of morphemes in reading

The positional properties of morphemes differ depending on whether they are free morphemes (i.e., morphemes that occur as free-standing words, such as farm in farmer) or bound morphemes (i.e., prefixes and suffixes that always occur in combination with a stem morpheme, e.g., re- in reload or -er in farmer). While stems can occur in any position (e.g. un-pack, pack-ing, re-pack-ing), affixes have clear positional constraints (i.e., prefixes must occur at the beginning and suffixes at the end). The present project lexical decision as well as the recording of event-related potentials to experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading to gain a better understanding of the orthographic encoding principles that are at play when identifying embedded morphemes.