Counterintuitive Cross-Linguistic Differences: More Morphological Computation in English Than in Finnish

This study investigates the role of derivational morphology in lexical processing in two typologically quite different languages: Finnish and English. While Finnish is a language with an extremely rich morphology, English morphology is relatively poor. Consequently, the role of morphology in storing and processing words would be expected to be greater in Finnish than in English. With a series of visual lexical decision experiments in both languages, we find that the opposite is the case for derivational morphology: for English, parsing of morphological constituents is often required, whereas for Finnish, full-form storage and access seems to be the rule. We try to explain this counterintuitive finding by making an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of both languages.