It has often been hypothesized that speakers store regularly inflected forms as separate entries
in the lexicon. If this hypothesis is true, high-frequency lexical items will have lower error rates
on their inflections than will low-frequency lexical items. This is shown to be the case for errors
on irregular inflected forms in naturally occurring speech errors. High-frequency regularly inflected
forms exhibit a small (but nonsignificant) advantage in naturally occurring errors, and
a larger (significant) advantage in a more controlled experimental task in which subjects produced
the past-tense forms of regular verbs. These data are best explained by assuming that highfrequency
inflected forms are stored as separate entries in the lexicon. Consequences of this finding
for theories of language production and language learning are discussed.