Abstract:

In this behavioral study, we adopt the lexical decision paradigm to investigated Uyghur inflectional and derivational word processing of mental lexicon. Our experiments consist of two parts: inflectional word processing for experiment 1, and derivational word processing for experiment 2.In experiment 1,the results support to the view that morphological parsing takes place during the inflected word processing. Contrary to experiment 1, experiment 2 revealed that processing cost of the derived words is almost the same with the monomorphemic words. Our experimental results show that the processing of the inflected and derived words is independent from each other, in which a Uyghur speaker represents and accesses inflected words in a morphologically decomposed form, while derived words are accessed as single entities.

Key words: inflectional words;derivational words;Uyghur language