Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular inflected words cannot co-determine the phonetic realization of these inflected words. This study shows that the stem vowels of regular English inflected verb forms that are more frequent in their paradigm are produced with more enhanced articulatory gestures in the midsaggital plane, challenging compositional models of lexical processing. The effect of paradigmatic probability dovetails well with the Paradigmatic Enhancement Hypothesis and is consistent with a growing body of research indicating that the whole is more than its parts.

语言学中的词结构理论和认知心理学中的形态学处理理论很多都基于（心理）词典的构成观点，即在语音生成过程中，根据词素，词干和指数等次词汇要素建立了复杂的单词。当与词典中的存储仅限于不规则的假设结合使用时，可以得出这样的预测，即特定于正则变体词的属性无法共同确定这些变体词的语音实现。这项研究表明，在范式中更常见的常规英语变形动词形式的词根元音在矢状中平面产生了更多增强的发音手势，对词汇处理的构成模型提出了挑战。范式概率的影响与范式增强假说与不断发展的研究一致，表明整体不只是其组成部分。