Grammatical and semantic effects in reading derived nouns: A study of deep dyslexia

In this study, we assess the reading performance of a deep dyslexic patient, GR, in order to distinguish between two models describing the processing of morphologically complex words. One model suggests a direct access to full-form lexical representations from the semantic system (e.g., Caramazza, 1997), the other posits the lemma level between the semantic system and a morpheme-based lexicon (e.g., Levelt et al., 1999). The results of three experiments indicate that a) morphemes are accessed during the production of complex words, b) grammatical properties of morphemes have an effect in word retrieval and c) semantics play only a marginal role in this process. Considered together, this data are in line with models of complex word production positing a lemma-lexeme architecture (Levelt et al., 1999).