Morphological processing in visual word recognition has been extensively studied in a few languages, but other languages with interesting morphological systems have received little attention. Here, we examined Malay, an Austronesian language that is agglutinative. Agglutinative languages typically have a large number of morphemes per word. Our primary aim was to facilitate research on morphological processing in Malay by augmenting the Malay Lexicon Project (a database containing lexical information for almost 10,000 words) to include a breakdown of the words into morphemes as well as morphological properties for those morphemes. A secondary goal was to determine which morphological variables influence Malay word recognition. We collected lexical decision data for Malay words that had one prefix and one suffix, and first examined the predictive power of 15 morphological and four lexical variables on response times (RT). Of these variables, two lexical and three morphological variables emerged as strong predictors of RT. In GAMM models, we found a facilitatory effect of root family size, and inhibitory effects of prefix length and prefix percentage of more frequent words (PFMF) on RT. Next, we explored the interactions between overall word frequency and several of these predictors. Of particular interest, there was a significant word frequency by root family size interaction in which the effect of root family size is stronger for lowfrequency words. We hope that this initial work on morphological processing in Malay inspires further research in this and other understudied languages, with the goal of developing a universal theory of morphological processing.

Foreign-accented speech presents a challenge for native speakers of a given language. When presented with foreign-accented speech, native speakers tend to rely heavily on context and other lexical cues. When processing isolated spoken words, participants do not have access to contextual cues and have to rely solely on acoustic cues. Thus, processing accented spoken words in isolation might be a bigger challenge. We tested the hypothesis that identification accuracies by native speakers of American English of two foreign-accented speakers with different accent strengths will not differ in isolated spoken word recognition task. Ten native speakers of American English rated the accent of a Chinese-accented (heavy accent) and a Korean-accented (moderate accent) speakers after hearing a small passage read by both speakers. Different set of native speakers of American English heard a list of isolated words spoken by both speakers and had to type what they had heard. Overall, participants did not differ in their accuracy in the identification task even though the speakers differed in the strength of their accent, while there was no significant difference in participants rating of the strength of the speakers’ accents. Implication of the results on the processing of foreign-accented speech will be discussed.