Lexical status of inflectional and derivational suffixes: Evidence from Finnish

The present study tested whether Finnish inflectional or derivational suffixes have lexical access units separate from word roots. In three lexical decision experiments, pseudowords carrying a case-inflection required significantly longer rejection times than nonaffixed pseudowords. This suggests that case-inflections have separate lexical access units. Similar effects were obtained For productive derivational suffixes, too. A specific lexical architecture, being able to account For both the present pseudoword results as well as earlier ones obtained with real Finnish nouns, is proposed.