Rastle, K. & Davis, M. .
There is a broad consensus that readers recognize words through the analysis of morphological structure. Indeed, there is emerging evidence to suggest that the acquisition of morphemic knowledge may be a critical part of what it means to become a skilled reader. Yet, remarkably little is known about how individuals come to acquire the morphemically-structured lexical representations that allow them to undertake such an analysis. In this talk we first argue that this question represents an important new area for theory development. Besides the obvious significance of this question for building a complete theory of language processing, we believe that understanding how morphemic knowledge is acquired should permit deeper insight into the mechanisms that underlie online morphological decomposition. We then present a new laboratory method for investigating the acquisition of morphological knowledge in which adult participants are trained on novel suffixes (e.g., -nept) presented in novel word contexts (e.g. sleepnept) then tested immediately or some days after training. We show that results across several studies indicate that participants can acquire morphological representations in a laboratory context that are sufficiently robust to generalise to the online, speeded interpretation of novel untrained exemplars (e.g. sailnept), and thus argue that this method provides one way in which difficult questions about acquisition can be addressed in a highly-controlled setting. More generally, our studies motivate a dynamic and flexible account of a morphologically-structured lexicon, whereby form- and meaning-based generalizations can be readily extracted from a limited set of exemplars.