The interplay of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity in lexical processing: Evidence from a morphologically rich language

This study addresses the role of three factors in morphological processing of visually presented words in Finnish: word formation type (inflection ver sus derivation), productivity and affixal homonymy. Three visual lexical de cision experiments show that complex words can be processed slower, equally fast, or even faster than comparable monomorphemic word forms. We will arg ue that this diverse pattern of results reflects the ways different complex words are stored and processed. Moreover it indicates that the balance of storage and computation crucially depends on the interplay of the three abo ve-mentioned factors. Surprisingly, our results converge in a manner consis tent with data obtained from a typologically very different language, namel y Dutch.