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Processing of English inflectional morphology

J A Sereno1, A Jongman

  • 1Department of Modern Languages, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. joan.sereno@cornell.edu

Memory & Cognition
|July 1, 1997
PubMed
Summary

This study on English inflectional morphology found that word frequency, not rules, predicts processing speed for inflected nouns. This suggests a unified system for handling regular inflections in the lexicon.

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Debate exists on how inflectional morphology is processed online.
  • Two models propose rule-based derivation or associative mappings for inflected forms.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate the online processing of inflectional morphology in English.
  • Determine if regular inflected forms are rule-derived or processed via associative mappings.

Main Methods:

  • Lexical decision tasks were employed across a series of experiments.
  • Response latencies to nouns and verbs were measured.
  • Noun stimuli with varying inflectional structures were compared.

Main Results:

  • Nouns showed significantly shorter response latencies than verbs.
  • Response latencies were consistently predicted by the surface form's frequency (inflected or uninflected).
  • Differences in latency were linked to the relative frequency of uninflected vs. inflected forms for nouns and verbs.

Conclusions:

  • Findings support a unitary associative system for processing regular noun inflections in English.
  • Evidence argues against a rule-based derivation model for regular inflected plurals from a single lexical entry.

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