Structure in words: the present and future of morphological processing in a multidisciplinary perspective

Guest Editors: Davide Crepaldi, Marco Marelli and Simona Amenta

How morphologically complex words (such as speak-er or sword-fish) are processed and stored in the language system has been for long a central topic within the study of word recognition. The field expanded enormously from the times when the first, seminal psycholinguistic experiments were published (e.g., Taft and Forster, 1975), and now it is rather undisputed that understanding the mechanisms underlying the processing of complex words provides a window on more general issues about the cognitive system, such as learning (e.g., Tamminen et al., 2012), abstract cognition, creativity (e.g., Costello & Keane, 2000), and the compositional and productive capabilities of the human brain (e.g., Bemis and Pylkkanen, 2012). Also, accounting for complex words has become a frontier for wider fields of research, such as reading, reading acquisition, and visual word identification more in general (e.g., Amenta and Crepaldi, 2012; Burani et al., 2008; Perry et al., 2010). The field has also grown enormously from a methodological perspective, going heavily interdisciplinary -- contributions from neuroscience, neuropsychology, theoretical linguistics, information theory, computer science are nowadays commonplace in the morphological processing literature. As a result, the time is ripe for looking at where we are now, and trying to establish where we should go in the future as a field—this is the goal of this special issue. 

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