ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the main results from a series of Finnish studies dealing with single-word experiments with aphasics as well as lexical decision and eye-movement registration tests performed on normals. Most studies of mental morphology either explicitly or tacitly assume some isomorphic links between autonomous linguistic models and the corresponding cognitive architecture. In psycholinguistic studies of Finnish, they introduced a more eclectic, multi-method view into their research topic, their aim being to create, on the basis of converging evidence drawn from different sources, an outline for a psycholinguistically motivated processing model of Finnish morphology. Eye-movement registrations performed on H. H. corroborated the conclusion that inflected nouns are processed differently from monomorphemic nominative singulars, since the total number of fixations was higher with the inflected nouns. The Stem Allomorph/Inflectional Decomposition (SAID) model is the first psycholinguistic model with an experimental basis that deals with the processing of polymorphemic words in a language like Finnish.
