ABSTRACT
One of the basic processes involved in reading is word recognition. This process is a very efficient one considering the fact that the normal reading rate is around five to eight words a second. This process involves looking up a word and retrieving the associated information in the very short time span of 125 – 200 ms. This is fast considering estimations of passive vocabulary size of approximately seventy thousand lemma's (Oldfield, 1963). The number of access representations could be dramatically higher if one would assume that every inflected form of such a lemma would have its own access representation. Thus, a theory of word recognition has to take into account the morphological status of access representations. Some aspects of this issue also have consequences, as we argue presently, for word recognition as it occurs during reading, that is, when word recognition takes place as part of processing a larger linguistic structure than the single word.
