Stem complexity and inflectional encoding in language production

Three experiments are reported that examined whether stem complexity plays a role in inflect-ing polymorphemic words in language production. Experiment 1 showed that preparation effects for words with polymorphemic stems are larger when they are produced among words with con-stant inflectional structures compared to words with variable inflectional structures and simple stems. This replicates earlier findings for words with monomorphemic stems (Janssen et al., 2002). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that when inflectional structure is held constant, the prepa-ration effects are equally large with simple and compound stems, and with compound and com-plex adjectival stems. These results indicate that inflectional encoding is blind to the complexity of the stem, which suggests that specific inflectional rather than generic morphological frames guide the generation of inflected forms in speaking words. KEY WORDS: inflectional frames; language production; morphology