Evaluating Inflectional Complexity Crosslinguistically: a Processing Perspective

The paper provides a cognitively motivated method for evaluating the inflectional complexity of a language, based on a sample of"raw" inflected word forms processed and learned by a recurrent self-organising neural network with fixed parameter setting. Trainingitems contain no information about either morphological content or structure. This makes the proposed method independent of bothmeta-linguistic issues (e.g. format and expressive power of descriptive rules, manual or automated segmentation of input forms, numberof inflectional classes etc.) and language-specific typological aspects (e.g. word-based, stem-based or template-based morphology).Results are illustrated by contrasting Arabic, English, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish.