The mental representation of derived words: An experimental study of -sa and -mi nominals in Japanese.

Deadjectival nominals with -sa and -mi in Japanese are both phonologically transparent and morphologically decomposable. However, whilst -sa essentially serves to form nouns out of adjectives, -mi forms function as semantic labels with specific meanings. We examined -sa and -mi nominals in three experiments, an eye-movement experiment presenting -sa and -mi forms in sentence contexts and in two word recognition experiments using (primed and unprimed) lexical decision, to investigate the nature of their form-level representations. Whilst the word recognition experiments produced the same pattern of results for -sa and -mi forms, the eye-movement experiment demonstrated clear differences: -mi forms elicited longer reading times compared to -sa forms, except when the particular meanings of -mi forms were contextually licensed. These results show how different semantic properties affect the performance of derived words that have the same type of word level representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]