Effects of semantic markedness in the processing of regular nominal singulars and plurals in Italian

Abstract

Are fully regular complex words stored as wholes in the lexicon in a language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology such as Italian? Surprisingly, in certain circumstances the answer appears to be yes. In this paper, we will introduce empirical evidence for the storage of locally unmarked plurals in Italian in visual word recognition and analyze this evidence in a mathematical model of lexical processing developed in Schreuder and Baayen (1996) and Baayen, Dijkstra and Schreuder (1995). We will argue that, unlike in traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic models of the lexicon, morphological rules and storage of complex words are not mutually incompatible. We will show that their combined availability speeds up lexical processing.