A (distributional) semantic perspective on the processing of morphologically complex words

Abstract While morphemes are theoretically defined as linguistic units linking form and meaning, semantic effects in morphological processing are not reported consistently in the literature on derived and compound words. The lack of consistency in this line of research has often been attributed to methodological differences between studies or contextual effects. In this paper, we advance a different proposal where semantic effects emerge quite consistently if semantics is defined in a dynamic and flexible way, relying on distributional semantics approaches. In this light, we revisit morphological processing, taking a markedly cognitive perspective, as allowed by models that focus on morphology as systematic meaning transformation or that focus on the mapping between the orthographic form of words and their meanings.