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

Publisher: SPRINGER/PLENUM PUBLISHERS

: 2006

: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

: JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH

: J PSYCHOLINGUIST RES

: 35

: 2

: 121

: 146

: 26

: 0090-6905

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-005-9008-1

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.