How words are recognized? How do we process word meaning? These questions have been pursued in lexical access and word recognition studies in the last half century of research in psycho-, neuro-, and linguistics. Morphological processing is an essential level of processing for information extraction during word recognition. In one extreme, full-entry models propose whole word storage in memory and post-lexical morphological processing based on paradigms; in the other extreme, decompositional models posit pre-lexical decomposition and morphemic activation based on rules; between then, dual-mechanism models consider two routes for word recognition, a whole-word associative route and a combinatorial rule-based route. In the present thesis, it was investigated the morphological processing of French inflected verbs in visual modality in five studies. Study 1 researched the mental lexicon organization in function of surface and cumulative frequencies; Study 2 explored different stem formation processes; Study 3 investigated morphological operations in the inflectional suffixes; Study 4 tested the verbal morphological processing in L2 French speakers; and Study 5 tested verbal violations coupled with electroencephalography acquisition. The results suggest that all inflected French verbs are processed by a single-mechanism model with pre-lexical morphological decomposition for lexical activation and word recognition. It is proposed different processing for the lexical and functional morphemes. Words are decomposed in atomic morphemes, morphemic representations are activated in the mental lexicon, and word constituents are recombined for word verification