Effects of family size for complex words

Schreuder and Baayen (1997) reported that in visual lexical decision, response latencies to a simplex noun are shorter when this noun has a large morphologic al family, i.e., when it appears as a constituent in a large number of derived words and compounds. The present study addresses the question of whether the Family Size of the base word of a complex word likewise affects lexical processing. Six experiments are reported that show that Family Size indeed plays a role for both inflected and derived words. Posthoc analyses show that the effect of Family Size is driven by the semantically transparent family members and that this effect ih further constrained by semantic Selection restrictions of the affix in the target word. (C) 2000 Academic Press.