ABSTRACT
Lexical statistics and a production experiment are used to gauge the extent to which the linguistic notion of morphological productivity is relevant for psycholinguistic theories of speech production in languages such as Dutch and English. Lexical statistics of productivity show that despite the relatively poor morphology of Dutch, new words are created often enough for the marginalisation of word formation in theories of speech production to be theoretically unattractive. This conclusion is supported by the results of a production experiment in which subjects freely created hundreds of productive, but only a handful of unproductive, neologisms. Butterworth suggested that the procedures for dealing with neologisms are, at least in languages like English or Dutch, of an analogical nature, crucially depending on some not fully predictable lexical item serving as the model for the creation of a new form. A tentative solution is proposed as to why the opposite pattern has been observed in the speech of jargonaphasics.
