TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Meyer, Antje
A1  - Zwitserlood, Pienie
T1  - Inflectional complexity and experience affect plural processing in younger and older readers of Dutch and German
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflections can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder [(1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 94–117. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2509] proposed a dual-route model in which singular-dominant plurals (“brides”) are decomposed, while plural-dominant plurals (“peas”) are accessed as whole-word units. We report two lexical-decision experiments investigating how plural processing is influenced by participants’ age and morphological complexity of the language (German/Dutch). For all Dutch participants and older German participants, we replicated the interaction between number and dominance reported by Baayen and colleagues. Younger German participants showed a main effect of number, indicating decomposition of all plurals. Access to stored forms seems to depend on morphological richness and experience with word forms. The data pattern fits neither full-decomposition nor full-storage models, but is compatible with dual-route models.
KW  - Morphological processing
KW  - morphological complexity
KW  - ageing
KW  - lexical decision
KW  - plural processing
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1247213
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 32
IS  - 4
SP  - 471
EP  - 487
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -