| Abstract | 36 high-school seniors, who were native speakers/readers of Serbo-Croat, made rapid lexical decisions to inflected nouns in 3 cases: nominative singular, dative/locative singular, and instrumental singular. Both regularly and irregularly declined nouns were used. Regularly declined nouns were divided evenly between the masculine and feminine gender. The irregularly declined nouns were all feminine and were irregular in either the dative/locative singular form or in the instrumental singular form. Regardless of gender and regularity, mean lexical decision times were the same for the more frequently occurring dative/locative singular and the less frequently occurring instrumental singular, and were the shortest for the nominative singular. It is proposed that the nominative singular case, functioning as a nucleus around which the obliques cluster as satellites, preserves morphological relationships. |
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