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PAST-TENSE GENERATION FROM FORM VERSUS MEANING: BEHAVIOURAL DATA AND SIMULATION EVIDENCE.
Anna M Woollams1, Marc Joanisse, Karalyn Patterson
1Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Journal of Memory and Language
|February 18, 2010
Summary
Verb inflection processing shows irregular verbs are harder to process than regular ones. However, this regularity effect disappears when generating past tense from meaning, supporting single-mechanism models of language.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Inflectional morphology studies typically use stem-to-past-tense generation, revealing a processing disadvantage for irregular verbs.
- Dual- and single-mechanism theories explain this regularity effect, but diverge on predictions for meaning-based inflection tasks.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of task demands on the verb inflection regularity effect.
- To differentiate between dual- and single-mechanism theories of inflectional morphology.
Main Methods:
- Participants generated past tenses from either verb stems or action pictures (meaning).
- The regularity effect (irregular vs. regular verb processing) was compared across these two conditions.
Main Results:
- A robust regularity effect was observed when generating past tense from verb stems.
- This regularity effect was not reliable when generating past tense from meaning.
Conclusions:
- The findings challenge dual-mechanism theories assuming obligatory stem retrieval for inflection.
- Results support single-mechanism models where stem retrieval is task-dependent.
- A novel single-mechanism model incorporating distributed representations is proposed.
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