The role of context in morphological processing: Evidence from Finnish

This paper is concerned with the role of context on the processing of infle cted nouns in Finnish. Identification of partitive plurals with the homonym ic suffix -jA was studied by presenting the target nouns in a sentence cont ext and by recording durations of readers' eye fixations and self-paced rea ding times for these targets. A recent visual lexical decision study indica ted that the same inflected words with -jA were sensitive to surface freque ncy manipulations, but not to base frequency manipulations. The authors int erpreted these results to suggest that these inflectional forms are stored and processed by means of their whole-word representations. In contrast, th e present context study shows both a surface frequency effect and a lagged base frequency effect. We argue that syntactic cues prior to the target wor d prime the inflectional reading of the -jA suffix, and as a consequence th e base is reinstated as an effective unit in processing these nouns with a homonymic suffix.