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Asymmetries in the Processing of Affixed Words in Bengali
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Abstract
Prefixes and suffixes display distinctive linguistic behaviors. Not only does a crosslinguistic asymmetry exist between them in terms of structural properties, combinatorial constraints, and frequency, but there is also extensive evidence that prefixes and suffixes are processed differently. To further investigate the differences in how prefixes and suffixes are processed, we conducted five crossmodal priming experiments in Bengali, a language rich in derivational morphology. Although all combinations of stems, prefixes, and suffixes provided facilitation, we found that stems primed related prefixed forms to a greater degree than they primed related suffixed forms. Furthermore, morphologically related prefixed forms primed other prefixed forms more than suffixed forms primed related suffixed forms. On the basis of these findings, we propose that the asymmetry in how prefixes and suffixes are processed is due not only to differences in perception, reading, and inhibition from the phonological cohort, but also to the salience of the morpheme boundaries in affixed word representations during recognition.
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Footnotes
*
This study has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant awarded to Professor Aditi Lahiri (grant agreement number 695481). We would also like to express our thanks to Professor Henning Reetz for his assistance with the design and running of these experiments and to Dr. Steven Kaye for proofreading. Last but never least, the fieldwork this research is based on would not have been possible without the participation of the staff and students at Jadavpur University and Bethune College, University of Calcutta. Work on this paper by Swetlana Schuster was done prior to her affiliation with Amazon.
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