ABOUT THE ROLE OF DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY IN READING: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH IN SPANISH

For the past decades, an intense debate has taken place within Psycholinguistics about the way in which derivational morphemes are processed in the mental lexicon. On the other hand, Psycholinguistics has also focused on how written words are processed and how children learn to read. At the junction of these two research avenues, a series of studies have concentrated on studying how morphemes affect reading and, consequently, reading acquisition. The number of studies that have explored this issue in Spanish is particularly scarce. The aim of this article is, in the first place, to analyze the results of research works that have tackled this research topic in Spanish in the past fifteen years, and, in the second place, to discuss some of them so as to extract joint conclusions and suggest future research lines.