The Inflectional Morphology Representation of Individual Words in the Mental Lexicon

Models of complex word recognition can be separated into two wide groups: symbolic and connectionist. Symbolic models presume the existence of an explicit morphological representation of individual words; connectionist models do not and consider morphological effects to be a by-product of interaction between phonological, orthographic and semantic information. This study aimed to test whether there are explicit mental representations of inflected lexical units in the mental lexicon. Accordingly, the method of inflected suffix morphological and semantic priming of nouns in the Serbian language was used. In the morphological priming condition, the prime and the target shared the same inflectional suffix. In Experiment 1 overt priming was used, while in Experiment 2, masked priming. The results showed no significant effects of inflected suffix morphological priming, while significant semantic priming effects were recorded. The results obtained in this research are in line with predictions of the connectionist models.