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In this study, we looked at priming eVects produced by a short presentation (47 ms) of morphologically complex pseudowords in French. In Experiment 1, we used as primes semantically interpretable pseudowords made of the grammatical combination of a root and a suYx, such as rapidiWer "to quickify." In Experiment 2, we used non-morphological pseudowords such as rapiduit, where -uit is an existing ending in French, but is not a suYx. In Experiment 3, primes were pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and suYxes, such as sportation, formed by the noun sport "sport" and the suYx -ation (-ation only attaches to verbs). Results of Experiment 1 show that morphologically complex pseudowords signiWcantly facilitated the recognition of their roots. This priming eVect was equivalent to the facilitation obtained when existing derived words were used as primes. In Experiment 2, no priming eVect was obtained with non-morphological pseudowords, demonstrating that the mere occurrence of the target at the beginning of the pseudoword prime is not suYcient to produce any priming and that an orthographic account of the results is not viable. Finally, Experiment 3 shows that the semantic interpretability of the morphologically complex pseudowords does not aVect priming, as facilitation eVect is obtained with morphologically complex non-interpretable pseudowords. The results reveal an early morphological decomposition triggered by the morphological structure of the prime, but insensitive to its lexicality or interpretability. 

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Dans cet article, nous analysons un changement important survenu dans le système aspectuel du moyen français : la perte de productivité de certains préfixes aspectuels. Nous exposons ensuite la démarche méthodologique nécessaire à l’analyse de faits morphosyntaxiques en diachronie. Nous illustrons ce changement en analysant l’évolution du préfixe a-. Notre recherche allie le recours aux données de sources secondaires extraites des dictionnaires de l’ancien et du moyen français à l’analyse d’un corpus catégorisé à l’aide d’un outil d’analyse de textes par ordinateur, SATO. Nous étayerons l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’aspect a évolué vers une plus grande compositionnalité et résulte de l’interaction de différents processus en français moderne, dont l’érosion sémantique de la préposition à.This article proposes an analysis of an important change which took place in the aspectual system of Middle French, i.e. the loss of productivity of some aspectual prefixes. We also present the methodology that we have developed to analyze morphosyntactic facts in diachrony. We illustrate the change by an analysis of the prefix a-. Our research is based on secondary sources from dictionaries of Old and Middle French and on data from a wide corpus tagged with SATO, a computational text analyzer. We provide arguments in order to show that aspect has changed in favor of a larger compositionality and is now the result of the interaction of different processes in Modern French, one of which being the semantic erosion of the preposition à