Lexical access to inflected words as measured by lateralized visual lexical decision

In two lateralized visual lexical decision experiments conducted with normal subjects, we studied hemispheric performance in the recognition of case-inflected Finnish nouns. Previous research employing mainly locative cases has indicated that such noun forms undergo morphological decomposition. The present experiments extend this finding to syntactic cases by showing that nouns with partitive or genitive endings take longer to recognize and elicit more errors than otherwise comparable monomorphemic nominative singular nouns. Morpheme-based recognition of all case-inflected forms would be a particularly appropriate solution for mental lexicon in highly inflecting languages like Finnish: it saves storage space and enables fast recognition of inflected forms not encountered before. In real words, morphological structure did not interact with visual field. However, particularly demanding, morphologically decomposable nonwords elicited more errors in the left visual field/right hemisphere than did nondecomposable nonwords. Our results suggest that at least in Finnish, both hemispheres are capable of morpheme-based access, but this mechanism is more accurate in the left than in the right hemisphere. Received: 21 May 1997 / Accepted: 19 January 1998