The majority of the new words that we learn everyday as adults are morphologically complex; yet, we don’t know much about the role of morphology in novel word learning. A recent study by Ginestet et al. (2020) showed that morphological structure: (i) facilitates processing of complex nonwords (RElerbER) compared to simple ones (pelerble) in early stages of processing; (ii) shows mixed ef ects when it comes to orthographic learning. Here we extend this work by focusing on learning of semantics, and additionally on how the presence of a suf ix induces the attribution of meaning to the rest of the word (stem learning): if pifer is someone who writes children’s’songs, then pife is a children song.