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Recognition of inflected words in a morphologically limited language: frequency effects in monolinguals and bilinguals.

Lehtonen M, Niska H, Wande E, Niemi J, Laine M

Department of Psychology, Abo Akademi University, 20500 Turku, Finland. minlehto@abo.fi

The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with low-frequency inflected nouns, while with medium- and high-frequency inflections, full-form processing was apparently employed. The bilinguals demonstrated a similar pattern. The results suggest that morpheme-based recognition is employed even in a morphologically limited language when the inflectional forms occur rarely. With more frequent inflectional forms, full-form representations have developed for both mono- and bilingual speakers. In a comparable study employing a morphologically rich language, Finnish, Lehtonen and Laine (2003, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 213-225) observed full-form access only at the high-frequency range and only for monolinguals. These differences suggest that besides word frequency and language background, the morphological richness of a language affects the processing mode employed with polymorphemic words.

Published 4 May 2006 in J Psycholinguist Res, 35(2): 121-46.
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