WORD RECOGNITION OF INFLECTED VERBS IN BULGARIAN - EVIDENCE FROM NORMAL PERFORMANCE ON A LEXICAL DECISION TASK

In order to address the issue of lexical representation and access, an attempt was made to probe the status of the root and the existence of a differential treatment of regularly and irregularly inflected verbs in Bulgarian, a highly inflected language. We found a significant dif ference between the reaction times for verbs with a root which is a wo rd in Bulgarian, and verbs that contain a nonword root, underscoring t he lexical status of word roots. A decomposition process during word r ecognition for verbs with no idiosyncracies, and a separate but not in dependent lexical representation for irregularly inflected past forms are proposed.