Morphologically based frequency effects in the recognition of irregularly inflected verbs

Lexical decision latencies were compared for two sets of irregularly inflected verb forms. These had been matched pairwise on frequency of occurrence of the word form that was presented for recognition (e.g. bought; shook ) but the sets differed on the frequency of their associated citation form ( buy vs. shake ). The frequency of the citation form was a reliable determinant of recognition speed despite the fact that the citation forms were not presented to the subjects and the relationship between the irregularly inflected form and the citation form cannot be established by purely orthographic analysis. This suggests that the recognition process tapped in lexical decisions involves contact of the stimulus with an abstract, intra‐lexical, morphological representation.