In this study the visual recognition of inflected, derived and monomorphemic Swedish nouns in monolingual Swedish and bilingual Finnish–Swedish speakers was investigated. While bilinguals were slower overall, the inflected items yielded disproportionately longer reaction times in the bilingual group. The derived items, on the other hand, elicited fastest reaction times in both groups. The observed processing cost associated with inflectional morphology indicates that bilingual language background can affect the recognition process for inflected words, possibly by leading to morpheme-based recognition which is slower than full-form recognition. Further studies are needed to examine whether this effect is specific to the language background of our bilinguals (including Finnish which is a morphologically very rich language) or whether it could be a more general processing feature in bilingual speakers faced with regular inflected forms.