Lexical representation of regular and irregular inflected nouns

Abstract

An experiment is reported in which native speakers/readers of Serbo-Croat made rapid lexical decisions to inflected nouns in three cases: nominative singular, dative/locative singular (these two cases are spelled the same way), and instrumental singular. Both regularly and irregularly declined nouns were used. The regularly declined nouns were divided evenly between the masculine and feminine gender. For regular masculine nouns the nominative singular is linguistically full and free. For regular feminine nouns the nominative singular is linguistically empty and bound. The irregularly declined nouns were all feminine. They were irregular in either the dative/locative singular form or in the instrumental singular form. Predictions were made from the ‘satellite entries” view (Lukatela et al., Memory and Cognition 8, 41-23. 1980) of how the inflected forms of a Serbo-Croatian noun are organized in the internal lexicon. According to this view each form is said to be represented in a unitary fashion (stem plus suffix) with the nominative singular accessed more easily than the oblique forms which are all accessible to the same degree despite marked differences in their individual frequencies of occurrence. The outcome of the experiment was consistent with the satellite entries hypothesis. Regardless of gender and regularity, mean lexical decision times were the same for the more frequently occurring dative/locative singular and the less frequently occurring instrumental singular, and were the shortest for the nominative singular.