Morphological productivity and neological intuition

This paper investigates the relationship between morphological productivity and neological intuition, defined as the ability to identify novel words as such. It can be hypothesised that the more productive a word-formation process is, the less salient the neologisms it forms will be. We test this hypothesis experimentally on neologisms formed with prefixes and suffixes of variable productivity. Three experiments are conducted, involving lexical identification and reading tasks with eye tracking, to provide a comprehensive description of neological intuition. The negative correlation between productivity and neological salience is supported by experimental results, but only in the case of suffixed neologisms, as opposed to prefixed ones. The effect of affix type on neological intuition can be explained by differences in the grammatical nature of prefixes and suffixes. Broadly speaking, investigating the linguistic factors of neological intuition provides an original approach to both linguistic and psycholinguistic issues related to word structure and lexical processing.