Processing trade-offs in the reading of Dutch derived words

This eye-tracking study explores visual recognition of Dutch suffixed words (e.g., plaats+ing “placing”) embedded in sentential contexts, and provides new evidence on the interplay between storage and computation in morphological processing. We show that suffix length crucially moderates the use of morphological properties. In words with shorter suffixes, we observe a stronger effect of full-forms (derived word frequency) on reading times than in words with longer suffixes. Also, processing times increase if the base word (plaats) and the suffix (-ing) differ in the amount of information carried by their morphological families (sets of words that share the base or the suffix). We model this imbalance of informativeness in the morphological families with the information-theoretical measure of relative entropy and demonstrate its predictivity for the processing times. The observed processing trade-offs are discussed in the context of current models of morphological processing.