Inflectional Morphology In English

MENTAL LEXICON
The mental lexicon is described as a mental dictionary which is thought to package together all of the orthographic, semantic and phonological information about known words (Rastle, 2007). In another definition, Garnham (1985) describes mental lexicon as the mental state of knowledge about words. The dictionary metaphor is very common in describing mental lexicon. Although they are organized differently a good dictionary and the mental lexicon contain the same kind of information (eg: spelling, part of speech, pronunciation and meaning). When a word is chosen in the lexicon to be used in the communication, that word is retrieved based on the similar kind of information found in a dictionary. The mental dictionary enables the

The main types of inflectional morphology in English are tense on verbs (bake–baked–baking) and number on nouns (girl–girls). Some other languages such as Turkish encode other types of information, such as gender and case, inflectionally (E.g., gel-di-m, /come-past tense - first person singular)
Inflectional morphology does not form new words, but result in different forms of the same word (Marslen Wilson, 2007). Psycholinguistic research on the mental representation of morphology has mainly focused on inflectional morphology. It is mainly because of the fact that inflectional morphemes mark syntactic features, such as tense in verbs or number in nouns. Words that contain inflectional affixes have forms and meanings that are fully predictable from the knowledge about the base and affix. In contrary to the derivational morphemes, inflectional morphemes do not change the meanings or the syntax of the base. They have primarily grammatical functions (Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994). Inflectional morphology found in English are past tense marker –ed, simple present tense third person singular marker –s, plural noun marker –s, and comparative or superlative markers –er and –est. Inflectional morphemes exist only as suffixes, there are no inflectional prefixes. One more characteristic