MEMORY REPRESENTATION FOR MORPHOLOGICALLY RELATED WORDS

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the memory status of inflectional forms of verbs (S, ED, ING), irregular past tense words, and adjective and nominal derivatives of verbs. The central question was whether inflections, irregular past tense forms, and derivatives have memory representations separate from their base verbs. The results indicated that inflections do not have memory representations separate from their base verbs but irregular past tense words and both types of derivatives do. While the latter three types of items seem to have separate memory entries for base verbs and their variations, the entries do not appear to be independent. There is evidence that accessing the variation results in activation of the representation for the base verb and that this activation is a necessary step in the processing of the variation. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.