Cross-linguistic evidence for morphological representation in the mental lexicon.

Three types of naturally occurring data address the question of morphological structure in the lexical entry: code-switching, novel forms, and speech errors. The data were collected from a wide variety of languages, including Austro-Polynesian, Semitic, and Altaic languages, and a heretofore untapped set of affixation types, including infixes, circumfixes, multiple affixes, reduplication, and nonconcatenative morphology. The data are used to argue for a dual-listing model of lexical representation (e.g., Pinker, 1991; Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1992) over full-listing (e.g., Butterworth, 1983) and fully parsed (e.g., Taft & Forster, 1975) models. The paper posits three morphological parameters which are activated language-specifically.