Affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage, even with inflected words, even in a morphologically rich language.
This paper investigates whether affixal homonymy, the phenomenon that one affix form serves two or more semantic/syntactic functions, affects lexical processing of inflected words in a similar way for a morphologically rich language such as Finnish as for morphologically restricted languages such as Dutch and English. For the latter two languages, there is evidence that affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage for inflected words (Bertram, R., Schreuder, R., and Baayen, R. H. (in press). The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Sereno and Jongman (1997). Processing of English inflectional morphology. Memory and Cognition, 25, 425-437). Two visual lexical decision experiments show the same pattern for Finnish. Apparently, the substantially richer morphology in Finnish does not prevent full-form storage for inflected words when the affix is homonymic.
Bertram
R
R
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland. rayber@utu.fi
Laine
M
M
Harald Baayen
R
R
Schreuder
R
R
Hyönä
J
J
D003071:Cognition; D019336:Cognitive Science; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading