Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon

Abstract

Current evidence suggests that there is a difference between the representations of multimorphemic words in production and perception. In perception, it is widely believed that both whole-word and root representations exist, while in production there is little evidence for whole-word representations. The present investigation demonstrates that whole-word and root frequency independently predict the duration of words suffixed with -ing, -ed, and -s, which reveals that both root and word representations play a role in the production of inflected English words. In a second line of analysis, we find that the number of inflected phonological neighbours independently predicts the duration of monomorphemic words, which extends these results and suggests that whole-word representations exist at the lexical level. Together these results suggest that both root and word representations of inflected words are stored in the lexicon and are relevant for the production of both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words.

Keywords: Frequency; Inflected neighbourhood density; Morphology; Speech production.