The mental lexicon comprises the representations of various words either in a morphologically decomposed form, or in a conceptually non-decomposed form. The durations of mono-morphemic and multimorphemic words are assumed to contain information on the routes of their lexical access.

The durations of Hungarian nouns with various lengths produced spontaneously by 10 young and 10 elderly speakers (with 55 years of difference between them) were measured. Findings showed significant differences depending on the words’ complexity and on age. The nouns both with and without suffixes were significantly longer in old than in young speakers. The durational differences depending on age were more pronounced in monomorphemic nouns as opposed to multimorphemic nouns. Along with the increasing number of syllables of the nouns, old speakers produced increasingly longer simple nouns (stems) than young ones did.

We suggest that multimorphemic nouns are accessed decompositionally in spontaneous utterances when the stem activation is followed by the activation of the suffixes. The specific storage and the corresponding lexical access of the morphemes explain the longer durations of the inflected nouns.