Recognition of spoken prefixed words: The role of early conditional root uniqueness points

Wurm (1997) introduced a construct called the Conditional Root Uniqueness Point (CRUP), which was defined as the uniqueness point of the free root of a prefixed word, given the prefix in question. About one in eight prefixed words with free roots is a CRUP word, which means that it has a CRUP that precedes its full-form uniqueness Point (UP) by at least one phoneme. In all other cases, the CRUP and full-form UP coincide. This study contrasts recognition performance for auditorilypresented CRUP words with performance on direct competitors of CRUP words, and also with performance on a group of control words. Lexical decision and naming latencies indicate a substantial processing advantage for CRUP words. Importantly, performance on direct competitors was no worse than performance on control words. This suggests that the competition among word candidates is a passive, bottom-up process. Implications for models of word recognition are discussed.