In the auditory modality, the recognition and identification of multimorphemic words involve the accessing of prosody information that contained in the lexical structure. Both the behavioral study and event-related potential research were constructed by the scholars, through the manipulations of acoustic cues and suprasegmental information (e.g., pitch contour, stress pattern, and syllable duration, etc.) of target words, both the behavioral results (e.g., reaction times) and brain responses of participants are analyzed to better understand the encoding procedure in the lexical-semantic representation. This article reviews a series of selected research, our goal is to provide evidence to account for how the prosody structure of multimorphemic words is processed in word recognition, and to what extent the deviant metrical structure of words can disrupt the lexical access.

prosody, multimorphemic words, auditory processing, ERP research