This paper deals with the impact of the salience of complex words and their constituent parts on lexical access. While almost 40 years of psycholinguistic studies have focused on the relevance of morphological structure for word recognition, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between the word as a whole unit and its constituent morphemes. Depending on the theoretical approach adopted, complex words have been seen either in the light of their paradigmatic environment (i.e., from a paradigmatic view), or in terms of their internal structure (i.e., from a syntagmatic view). These two competing views have strongly determined the choice of experimental factors manipulated in studies on morphological processing (mainly different lexical frequencies, word/non-word structure, and morphological family size). Moreover, work on various kinds of more or less segmentable items (from genuinely morphologically complex words like hunter to words exhibiting only a surface morphological structure like corner and irregular forms like thieves) has given rise to two competing hypotheses on the cognitive role of morphology. The first hypothesis claims that morphology organizes whole words into morphological families and series, while the second sets morphology at a pre-lexical level, with morphemes standing as access units to the mental lexicon. The present paper examines more deeply the notion of morphological salience and its implications for theories and models of morphological processing.

Literacy is an essential tool for functioning in a modern society and, as such, it is often taken for granted when developing second language learning curricula for people who need to learn another language. However, almost 750 million people around the world cannot read and write, because of limited or absent formal education. Among them, migrants face the additional challenge of having to learn a second language as they settle in a new country. Second language research has only recently started focusing on this population, whose needs have long been neglected. This contribution presents a systematic review of the classroom-based research conducted with such learners and aims at identifying the teaching practices that have proven to be successful and the principles that should inform curriculum design when working with this population. A first observation emerging from the review concerns the scarcity of experimentally validated studies within this domain. Nonetheless, based on the results of the available literature, this work highlights the importance of contextualized phonics teaching and of oral skills development, which turn out to be most effective when emphasis is put on learners’ cultural identities and native languages.

In recent times, paradigmatic approaches to word formation have become increasingly popular, but the very concept of derivational paradigm is still far from being clear and universally accepted: while paradigms are a useful construct for the treatment of inflectional phenomena, less straightforward is their adoption in the realm of derivation, which is characterized by numerous gaps and inconsistencies. The aim of our theoretical contribution is to discuss the representation that morphological entities and derivational relationships receive in paradigmatic approaches, especially those which are gaining popularity in recent developments of the research. Specifically, we will reflect on how word-internal and word-external morphological relationships are explained and modeled in different topological representations, starting from traditional organizations of cells in columns, to three-dimensional arrangements of morphological families, to schematic representations along the lines of the Construction Morphology framework and, finally, to Bybee’s multidimensional networks.

Following Silva & Clahsen seminal work, psycholinguistic research on L2 morphological processing has mainly adopted a morpheme-based, decompositional dual route approach suggesting that L2 learners have a limited access to morphological representation during processing and consequently rely more on lexical storage (

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