Derivation and the Mental Lexicon. How are Prefixed Complex Words Stored and Retrieved?

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.3, Technical University of Braunschweig (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Morphology, language: English, abstract: In the following paper, I will examine the field of the word-forming process derivation and in that regard, I want to focus on prefixed words and their representation in the mental lexicon. Specifying that within my paper, I will scrutinize the question ¿Derivation and The Mental Lexicon ¿ How are Prefixed Words Stored and Retrieved?¿. The researched topic is relevant for the field of linguistics because it is not yet clarified how exactly words are stored and retrieved in the brain.

To get a closer insight on the topic of derivation and particularly the process of affixation and its connection to the mental lexicon I will conduct the help of several textbooks to give an overview of the process itself and the mental lexicon. Apart from that, I will use selected literature to zoom in on the specific field of word storage and examine a study that is concerned with this.

Since the study is based on lexical decision tasks, I am going to analyze the implemented experiments and interpret how prefixed words are stored, namely via morphological decomposition. Further, I will state why and how the experiments suggest that kind of processing and briefly examine other possible theories of word storage of prefixed words.