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If readers analyse the morphemic constituents of printed words, then they might have trouble deciding that a stimulus like quickify (i.e., comprising an existing stem and affix) is not a word. In a seminal study, Taft and Forster (1975) observed that nonwords built of morphemic units (e.g., dejuvenate) are rejected more slowly in lexical decision than nonwords that do not comprise morphemic units (e.g., depertoire). In this example, juvenate is a bound stem meaning “young” (as in juvenile), while pertoire is not a bound stem. Bound stems are stems that cannot occur on their own. These findings were important because they suggested that morphemic analysis is a phenomenon that arises prior to lexical identification.

The morpheme interference effect has been replicated and extended across many studies (e.g., Burani, Dovetto, Thornton, & Laudanna, 1997; Caramazza, Laudanna, & Romani, 1988). Replicating the effect using English derived nonwords, Crepaldi et al. (2010) reported that morphemically structured nonwords such as gasful are rejected more slowly in lexical decision than nonwords without morphological structure such as gasfil. In an extension to these findings, they reported that the interference effect vanishes when the constituent morphemes are transposed (e.g., comparing fulgas to filgas), suggesting that sensitivity to affixes may be position specific (Crepaldi et al., 2010). Dawson, Rastle and Ricketts (2018) used stimuli from Crepaldi et al. (2010) to test whether the morpheme effect arises in participants of different ages: children (aged 7–9), young adolescents (aged 12–13), older adolescents (aged 16–17), and adults. They found a morpheme interference effect on accuracy in all groups, but reported an effect on response time only in adults and older adolescents. These findings provide evidence that relatively young readers are sensitive to morphological structure, but that knowledge of these important indicators of meaning builds through the process of reading acquisition (see also Castles & Nation, this volume).