Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important issue in recent work on lexical representation is whether inflected past tense forms are represented as single units or in morphologically decomposed form, and whether this varies according to the regulartity of the fonns involved. W e investigated this by looking at competitor effects between homophonic past tense forms (paced/paste, made/maid) where we varied the relative frequencies of the past tense form and its homophonic competitor. In particular, if regular forms are represented in morphologicaly decomposed form, as is widely argued, and irregular forms are listed as single units, this should lead to contrasting effects. To investigate this we used two tasks - writing to dictation and cross modal priming to compare frequency effects for regular and irregular forms. The results for both type of experiment were highly consistent, showing parallel effects of frequency for both regular and irregular forms. W e discuss the implications of this for claims about the lexical representation of morphologically complex forms.