Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon

Abstract

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the SerboCroatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independententries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun's frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.Inflection is the major grammatical device of SerboCroatian, Yugoslavia's principal language. In general, the grammatical cases of nouns are formed by adding a suffix to a root morpheme, where the suffix is of the vowel, vowel-consonant, or vowel-consonant-vowel type. Less frequently, inflection involves additional processes, such as vowel deletion and consonant palatalization.The grammatical cases of Serbo-Croatian nouns produced by inflection are not equal in their frequency of occurrence. Table I summarizes the frequency analysis of D. Kostic (1965) on a corpus of approximately 2 million Serbo-Croatian words appearing in the daily press and contemporary poetry. The nonitalicized numbers are actual percentages. Thus, for all nouns in the corpus, 12.83% were masculine nouns in the nominative singular, 7.8% were feminine nouns in the genitive singular, .13% were neuter nouns in the instrumental plural, and so on. Reading the totals, we

The role of semantic transparency in the processing of Finnish compound words

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