Informational approach to the processing of inflected morphology: Standard data reconsidered

Summary The present paper evaluates the two standard approaches to the processing of inflected morphology (decomposition and the satellite-entries hypothesis) in the scope of the results obtained on Serbo-Croatian inflected noun forms. It was demonstrated that the decomposition hypothesis cannot account for most of the results. On the other hand, some of the critical experiments upon which the satellite-entries hypothesis was based failed to replicate, and the hypothesis was rejected on empirical grounds. The approach proposed in the present study assumes that processing effects observed with inflected Serbo-Croatian noun forms are based on the subject's sensitivity to the amount of information (i. e., bits) within a particular inflected form. It was demonstrated that the basic unit of the subject's sensitivity is the amount of information derived from the average frequency per syntactic function within a particular inflected form of a noun. This parameter accounts for all the observed processing variability of the inflected Serbo-Croatian noun forms.