Abstract

Two experiments investigated the role of the size of the inflectional paradigm in processing Italian inflected verbs and adjectives, in mixed and blocked list conditions. In both lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2), verbs showed slower RTs than adjectives, although stimuli were matched for several psycholinguistic variables. "Post-hoc" correlational analyses showed different effects on reaction times and accuracy of variables related to frequency, with effects of root frequency for verbs only, and greater effects of whole-word frequency for adjectives relative to verbs. No list effects were found. These results are interpreted as evidence that a high number of inflected forms favours morphemic access, while a small inflectional family size leads to prevalent full-form processing.