Reading morphologically complex words in German: the case of particle and prefixed verbs

German verb stems may be combined with a particle or a prefix, forming particle and prefixed verbs, respectively. Both types of verbs are morphologically complex, yet particles are free morphemes, which are routinely separated from their stem and can stand alone in a sentence, whereas prefixes are bound morphemes, which are attached to their stem and cannot stand alone in a sentence. Morphologically complex words are thought to be segmented into their constituent morphemes during reading. On this assumption, we took advantage of the separability feature of the constituent morphemes of particle verbs to investigate how the segmentation process occurs in skilled reading. Thirty German adults participated in a sentence-reading task that employed the eye-contingent boundary paradigm in eye-tracking. We observed no differences in the processing of particle and prefixed verbs, which suggests that idiosyncratic linguistic characteristics do not modulate the way morphologically complex words are segmented in skilled reading.