Words with more than one meaningful part can be described in two ways: as independent lexical items or as the result of a rule that combines two morphemes into a single word. Recent approaches without morphological rules describe morphological patterns as phonological generalizations over a set of forms. Such proposals have two consequences: (1) regularly inflected forms may be stored in the lexicon, and (2) phonological factors should influence morphological processing. The aim of the research project is to examine these consequences using experiments-induced speech errors in three tasks: SLIPS (for phonological errors), morphonaming (for morphological errors where an inflected form is the target), and embedding (for morphological errors where the base form is the target). The results may demonstrate that non-rule-based approaches are unworkable, if they show that regular forms are not stored in the lexicon or that phonological factors cannot underlie morphological effects. However, if the results show that regular forms are stored and that phonological factors could underlie morphological effects, then non-rule-based approaches will still be workable.
