Phonological theories rely on rules being able to apply regularly to all members of a particular domain. When there are exceptions to these regular patterns, accounting for inconsistencies poses a challenge for phonological theories. This is especially true when morphophonological factors alone cannot explain the observed variation. In addition to phonological or morphological factors, this paper argues that the way words are recognized in the process of lexical access can account for exceptional morphophonological patterns. In two corpus studies, one on English (a morphologically poor language) and one on Turkish (a morphologically rich language), results show a correlation between factors consistent with lexical decomposition and morphophonological exceptionality. For both languages, exceptional suffixes are more likely to be decomposed from stems than non-exceptional suffixes. This suggests that there is a connection between the way complex words are processed in the lexicon and the way they are treated by the phonological grammar.