Word recognition of inflected verbs in Bulgarian: Evidence from normal performance on a lexical decision task

In order to address the issue of lexical representation and access, an attempt was made to probe the status of the root and the existence of a differential treatment of regularly and irregularly inflected verbs in Bulgarian, a highly inflected language. We found a significant difference between the reaction times for verbs with a root which is a word in Bulgarian, and verbs that contain a nonword root, underscoring the lexical status of word roots. A decomposition process during word recognition for verbs with no idiosyncracies, and a separate but not independent lexical representation for irregularly inflected past forms are proposed.