Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon.

The lex ica1 representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task" Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders" These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the Serbo-Croatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: ( 1) The independent entries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satell i te entries hypothesis t which assumes that all cases are individually represented with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun's frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly" The evidence strongly favors the satellite entries s" Inflection is the major grammatical device of Serbo-Croatian, Yugoslav ia' s principal language" In general t the grammatical cases of nouns are formed by adding a suffix to a root morpheme where the suffix is of the vowel or vowel-consonant or vowel-consonant-vowel Less frequently t inflection involves additional processes such as vowel deletion and consonant palatal ization " The grammatical cases of Serbo-Croatian nouns produced by inflection are not equal in their fre y of occurrence" Table 1 summari zes the frequency anal s of Dj (1) on a corpus of approx two million SerboCroatian words appear the daily press and y" The nonNICHD HD-O to Haskins of Connecticut @ This research of [HASKINS LABORATORIES (1 ]