Word frequency and morphological processing in Finnish revisited

The aims of the present study were to investigate the effects of word frequency on morphological processing of inflected words in Finnish, and to re-test previous results obtained for high frequency inflected words in Finnish which suggest that inflected words of high frequency might have full-form representations in the mental lexicon. Our results from three visual lexical decision experiments with monolingual Finnish speakers suggest that only very high frequency inflected Finnish words have full-form representations. This finding differs from results obtained from related studies in morphologically more limited Indo-European languages, in which full-form representations for inflected words seem to exist at a much lower level of frequency than in the morphologically rich Finnish language.