The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: The role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity

This article is concerned with the way in which the balance of storage-storing and processing words through full-form representations-and computation-storing and processing words through morpheme-based representations-in lexical processing in the visual modality is affected by the following 3 factors: word formation type (roughly, inflection vs. derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Experimental results for 5 different Dutch suffixes, combined with previous results obtained for 4 comparable Finnish suffixes (R. Bertram, M. Laine, & K. Karvinen, 1999) and 2 Dutch suffixes (R. H. Baayen, T. Dijkstra, & R. Schreuder, 1997), show that none of these factors in isolation is a reliable cross-linguistic predictor of the balance of storage and computation. The authors offer a general framework that outlines how morphological processing is influenced by the interaction of word formation type, productivity, and affixal homonymy.