Ten years ago, a group of researchers investigating the processing of morphological information met in the south of France to discuss how morphology affects word recognition, perception and production from a cross-linguistic perspective. This special issue is the fourth volume to expose the results of this on-going research effort.

The volume begins with a comprehensive review of the nature of morphological priming, followed by a series of experimental papers that examine morphological processing in a variety of languages such as English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, and Spanish. The parallel monitoring of morphological processing in reading, speech perception and production, using a wide array of experimental methods such as masked priming, long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, and the recording of electrophysiological activity, provides converging evidence regarding the nature of morphemic representations in the various languages.

The cross-linguistic perspective that characterizes the research effort of the present volume, as well as the previous ones, is used to investigate whether there are qualitative differences in the principles of lexical organization and lexical processing in different alphabetic orthographies that arise from qualitative differences in morphological structure.