In Spanish, the plural form in plural dominant frequency pairs, like “diente/dientes” [tooth/teeth], occurs more frequently than the corresponding singular form. On the other hand, for the singular dominant frequency pairs such as “cometa/cometas” [kite/kites], the singular form is more common than the plural. The recognition of singular forms by adult readers is dependent on the dominance factor, while the identification of plural forms relies on the frequency of the stem. Given that age and reading experience may influence morphological processing of words, we investigate the representation of singulars and plurals in Spanish primary school children in Third Grade (8/9) and Sixth Grade (11/12) and adults through a lexical decision task. Though children’s lexical decisions were twice as slow as adults, the pattern of morphological processing was consistent across ages: dominant plural forms resulted in decision times that were comparable to those of non-dominant singular forms, while recognition of singular-dominant forms was quicker than recognition of plural non-dominant forms. It appears that singulars are accessed and stored in the lexical memory as separate entities, while plurals depend on their morphological closer relatives, in this case, the singular forms.

在西班牙语中，复数主频率对中的复数形式，例如“diente/dientes”[牙齿/牙齿]，比相应的单数形式出现得更频繁。另一方面，对于单数主频率对，例如“cometa/cometas”[kite/kites]，单数形式比复数形式更常见。成人读者对单数形式的识别取决于主导因素，而对复数形式的识别则取决于词干的频率。鉴于年龄和阅读经验可能会影响单词的形态处理，我们通过词汇决策任务调查了西班牙小学三年级（8/9）和六年级（11/12）以及成人的单数和复数表示。尽管儿童的词汇决策速度是成人的两倍，但形态处理的模式在各个年龄段都是一致的：占主导地位的复数形式导致的决策时间与非占主导地位的单数形式的决策时间相当，而对单数占主导地位形式的识别速度则比成人更快。复数非主导形式的识别。看来单数是作为单独的实体被访问和存储在词汇记忆中的，而复数取决于它们形态上的近亲，在这种情况下是单数形式。