Morphological structure and the processing of inflected words

This paper is concerned with how our mind/brain processes morphologically complex words. We will show that the morphological structure of an inflected word determines the way it is processed. Specifically, we will argue that regularly inflected words have stem + affix representations and are typically computed via their constituent morphemes, whereas irregular inflection is represented in terms of lexical entries which are stored in associative memory. © 1997, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.