The role of context in morphological processing:: Evidence from Finnish

This paper is concerned with the role of context on the processing of inflected nouns in Finnish. Identification of partitive plurals with the homonymic suffix -jA was studied by presenting the target nouns in a sentence context and by recording durations of readers' eye fixations and self-paced reading times for these targets. A recent visual lexical decision study indicated that the same inflected words with -jA were sensitive to surface frequency manipulations, but not to base frequency manipulations. The authors interpreted these results to suggest that these inflectional forms are stored and processed by means of their whole-word representations. In contrast, the present context study shows both a surface frequency effect and a lagged base frequency effect. We argue that syntactic cues prior to the target word prime the inflectional reading of the -jA suffix, and as a consequence the base is reinstated as an effective unit in processing these nouns with a homonymic suffix.