Frequency Effects and the Representational Status of Regular Inflections

Abstract There have been many recent proposals concerning the nature of representations for inflectional morphology. One set of proposals addresses the question of whether there is decomposition of morphological structure in lexical access, whether complex forms are accessed as whole words, or if there is a competition between these two access modes. Another set of proposals addresses the question of whether inflected forms are generated by rule-based systems by connectionist type associative networks or if there is a dual system dissociating rule-based regular inflections from association-based irregular inflections. A central question is whether there are whole-word representations for regularly inflected forms. A series of five lexical decision experiments addressed this question by looking at whole-word frequency effects across a range of frequency values with constant stem-cluster frequencies. Frequency effects were only found for inflected forms above a threshold of about 6 per million, whereas such effects were found for morphologically simple controls in all frequency ranges. We discuss these data in the context of two kinds of dual models and in relation to competition models proposed within the connectionist literature.