Processing differences between nouns, adjectives, and verbs

SummaryProcessing differences were investigated for nouns, adjectives, and verbs in Serbocroatian, a language that depends strongly on inflection to convey grammatical information. Four lexical decision experiments were run. Two of them inspected processing of inflected forms of nouns, demonstrating analogous processing for both singular and plural forms. Processing of the nominative case was faster for both grammatical numbers. Reaction times for the various case forms were not related to their respective frequencies of occurrence. Adjectival processing, on the other hand, gave no privileged role to the nominative case and the inflected form frequency had a strong influence. Similarly, verbs also showed frequency-based processing. An explanation was proposed, suggesting that the organization of inflectional processing is dependent on the number of inflectional alternatives available to a given word.