Frequency and the lexical storage of regularly inflected forms

Abstract

It has often been hypothesized that speakers store regularly inflected forms as separate entries in the lexicon. If this hypothesis is true, high-frequency lexical items will have lower error rates on their inflections than will low-frequency lexical items. This is shown to be the case for errors on irregular inflected forms in naturally occurring speech errors. High-frequency regularly inflected forms exhibit a small (but nonsignificant) advantage in naturally occurring errors, and a larger (significant) advantage in a more controlled experimental task in which subjects produced the past-tense forms of regular verbs. These data are best explained by assuming that high frequency inflected forms are stored as separate entries in the lexicon. Consequences of this finding for theories of language production and language learning are discussed. © 1986 Psychonomic Society, Inc.