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Memory and Cognition
1997, 25 (4), 425-437
Processing
of English inflectional morphology
Joan A.
Sereno and Allard Jongman
| The present paper
explores the representation of inflectional morphology in the English lexicon.
There has been a long- standing debate about how these inflectional relationships
might be involved during on-line processing. Inflected forms may be derived
from an uninflected base form by rule application; by contrast, both regular
and irregular inflection may be treated in the same way, with morphological
patterns emerging from mappings between base and inflected forms. The present
series of experiments investigated these issues using a lexical decision
task. The first experiment showed that response latencies to nouns were
significantly shorter than those to verbs. A possible explanation for these
results can be found in differences in inflectional structure between English
nouns and verbs. Namely, the relative frequency of uninflected compared
with inflected forms is greater for nouns than for verbs. Two additional
experiments compared noun stimuli with different inflectional structures.
In all cases, differences in response latencies were predicted by the frequency
of the surface form whether uninflected or inflected. The pattern of results
lends support for a unitary associative system for processing regular inflection
of nouns in English and argues against the view that regular inflected plurals
are derived by rule from a single, uninflected lexical entry. |
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