THE MORPHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLEX NOUNS

This paper reports experimental results concerning the processing of m orphologically simplex nouns. It appears that the way in which these n ouns are processed is influenced not only by their own frequency of us e, but also by two other frequency measures. First, the token frequenc y of the corresponding plural inflection plays a role. Second, the typ e count of the number of compounds and derived words in which a given simplex noun appears as a constituent also affects our experimental me asures. We offer an explanation of these results in terms of the seman tic differences between noun pluralization as inherent inflection on t he one hand, and derivation and compounding on the other.