Informational approach to serbian inflectional morphology processing revisited: was the bit necessary in the first place?

Informational Approach (IA) to morphology processing has shaped significant body of psycholinguistic research in Serbian and some other languages. However, its central claim that word processing variability is fully accounted for by the amount of information carried by inflected word forms was not systematically tested utilizing full range of the word forms. Three experiments that employed complete Serbian noun form system were conducted, with masculine and neuter gender or the first time. Results obtained generally replicate previously reported, but we demonstrate that lexical-distributional variables, letter string length and form frequency, provide an equal prediction of average lexical decision latencies as it does theoretically driven derived IA measure, bits. Data analysis methods which IA theorizing crucially rests upon are not compatible with experiments? repeated design. Including grammatical complexity as obligatory term into the IA measures proved uncalled for. Models based on summary statistics such as IA hardly provide basis for unequivocal conclusions.