The processing of grammatical gender and number in Spanish

The aim of the present study is to explore the representation and processin g of inflectional morphology in Spanish. Experiment 1 compared the access t ime Sor words from the same base morpheme contrasted by the surface frequen cy of the masculine and feminine form, i.e., masculine-dominant items and f eminine-dominant items. The results showed a surface frequency effect in bo th types of items. Experiment 2 compared the access time for masculine Word s having the same surface frequency but differing in their summed frequency (masculine plus feminine forms), the results showing no significant effect of this parameter Finally, experiment 3 compared the access time for, word s from the same stem and contrasting by the surface frequencies for the sin gular and plural forms, i.e., singular-dominant and plural-dominant words. A clear frequency effect was observed for the singular-dominant words but n ot for plural-dominant ones. These results suggest that gender information is stored in the corresponding lexical entry and accessed from the full wor d form whereas the information about number is accessed from the stem corre sponding to the singular form.