The processing of English regular inflections: Phonological cues to morphological structure

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• English regular past tense forms (e.g., 'filled') are hypothesized to be processed differently from irregular forms (e.g., 'caught').
• Regular forms are thought to involve morpho-phonological assembly/disassembly (stem + affix), unlike irregular forms analyzed as whole units.
• Specific phonological cues, like final coronal consonants agreeing in voicing, signal potential regular inflections.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of morpho-phonological properties in processing English regular inflections.
• To determine if the 'English inflectional rhyme pattern' influences the speed of processing regular past tense forms.
• To test whether this effect extends to pseudo-inflections and nonwords mimicking regular inflections.

Main Methods:

• An auditory speeded judgment experiment was conducted.
• Participants listened to stimulus pairs and made rapid judgments.
• Stimuli included real inflections (filled-fill), pseudo-inflections (mild-mile), phonologically matched nonwords (nilled-nill), and monomorphemic controls (belt-bell).

Main Results:

• Stimuli interpretable as regular inflections (real, pseudo, or nonword) were responded to more slowly than unambiguous monomorphemic pairs.
• This morpho-phonological effect was observed regardless of voicing or syllabicity.
• Processing time was significantly impacted by the presence of cues for regular inflectional structure.

Conclusions:

• Evidence supports a fundamental morpho-phonological parsing mechanism for English regular inflections.
• This parsing process is triggered by criterial phonological properties, independent of actual lexical status.
• The findings highlight the brain's sensitivity to morphological structure in auditory word recognition.