The role of morphology in novel word learning: a registered report.

The majority of the new words that we learn every day as adults are morphologically complex; yet, we do not know much about the role of morphology in novel word learning. In this study, we tackle this issue by comparing the learning of: (i) suffixed novel words (e.g. ); (ii) novel words that end in non-morphological, but frequent letter chunks (e.g. ); and (iii) novel words with non-morphological, low-frequency endings (e.g. ). Words are learned incidentally through sentence reading, while the participants' eye movements are monitored. We show that morphology has a facilitatory role compared with the other two types of novel words, both during learning and in a post-learning recognition memory task. We also showed that participants attributed meaning to word parts (if is a state of happiness, then must mean happy), but this process was not specifically triggered by the presence of a suffix ( must also mean happy in and ), thus suggesting that the brain tends to assume similar meanings for similar words and word parts.