Phonology and neuropsychology of the English past tense

The double dissociation between the regular and irregular past tense in English has been explained in terms of dual and single mechanism accounts. In previous research we have argued that problems with the regular past tense in patients with left inferior frontal damage arise from morpho-phonological parsing difficulties [Trends in Cognitive Science 2 (1998) 428]. This claim has recently been challenged by a single mechanism connectionist account which argues that a general phonological processing deficit causes the poor performance on the regular past tense, with morphological factors playing no explicit role [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 (1999) 7592]. We used a speeded judgement task with four patients who have documented difficulties with the regular past tense to contrast the claims made by these different approaches. We compared patients' ability to detect the difference between the past tense and stem of regular (hugged/hug) and irregular (taught/teach) past tense verbs, as well as matched "pseudo" pairs (trade/tray and port/peach). These real word conditions were accompanied by matched sets of non-words (e.g. nugged/nug). Patients' latencies to the regular past tense real word-pairs were consistently slower than in any other condition. To test for a general phonological processing deficit, we conducted several tests of phonological processing ability. The results show that the patients had a range of difficulties in phonological processing, from very mild to severe. This did not correlate with their performance on the speeded judgement task. We interpret this pattern of results as support for a specialised morpho-phonological processing mechanism which can be dissociated from other phonological processes and which is used directly in the processing of the regular past tense in a dual-mechanism system.