Processing French: A Psycholinguistic Perspective (Yale Language Series)

Processing French presents a groundbreaking empirical study of the processing of morphologically simple and complex French words.  Peter Golato's research offers an insightful account of the lexical storage and retrieval of isolated words and words within sentences.

Processing French investigates the native-language processing of French, a language for which findings have not definitively supported a dual-mechanism account of morphological processing.  Through word- and sentence-level studies, the book accomplishes two goals. First, it offers behavioral evidence in support of a dual-mechanism processing account at the word level. In contrast to English, however, the evidence with French does not turn upon a contrast in inflectional regularity among verbs but instead hinges upon a diachronic contrast, with synchronic relevance, in the productivity of derivational suffixes among nouns.  Second, by incorporating the findings of the word-level studies into sentence-level studies, the book offers a window onto the morphological processing of displaced sentential elements, specifically morphologically simple and complex wh-moved nouns and raised lexical verbs.