Abstract
Opposing views of storage and processing of morphologically complex words (e.g., past tense) have been suggested: the dual system, whereby regular forms are not in the lexicon but are generated by rule, while irregular forms are explicitly represented; the single system, whereby regular and irregular forms are computed by a single system, using associative connections; and a system whereby phonological rules relate both regular and irregular past to present tense forms. Two reaction time experiments investigated the production of the past tense in English in response to the auditory presentation of the present tense of the verb. The first experiment addressed the methodology of presenting regulars and irregulars in blocked form as in a previous study (Jaeger et al. in Language 72:451–497, 1996). Blocked presentation results showed longer RTs for the elicitation of irregular pasts than for regular pasts; however, there were no differences between regular and irregular elicitation when the presentation was randomized, indicating that it is rules that are being primed. The second experiment tested whether the response time advantage found for blocked regular verbs in the first experiment might also extend to irregular verb forms exhibiting the same sub-regularity (e.g., sing-sang may prime ring-rang). Results showed a trend towards slower RTs when past tense forms from different sub-regularities follow one another, suggesting interference between one sub-regularity and another.
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Notes
Participants’ uncertainty about the correct form of the past tense led to the redesign of the Experiment 2. In the original design of Experiment 2, stimuli were to be presented in small blocks of similar verbs, varying from two to five items: for regular verbs, those exhibiting the same allophone and for irregular, those following the same sub-regularity. On the assumption that priming would occur from one item within a sub-regularity to the next, we had originally hypothesized that participants would show speeded responses over the course of a block. What was unexpected was the number of errors participants made even when a verb’s sub-regularity had been primed by the verb immediately preceding it. Because the presence of an error would diminish the advantage inherent in sub-regularity, any block containing an error had to be eliminated. Eliminating blocks containing errors then led to the elimination of seven participants for whom there were fewer than 25 responses in a condition once blocks containing a non-technical error were eliminated. In addition, for the remaining 24 participants, another 25 % of the data, 286 of the 1,152 potential blocks, had to be eliminated. As a result, Experiment 2 was redesigned, and data were coded, as described above, according to the morphological relation of each verb to the verb immediately preceding it.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by NIH Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories and grants from the Rhode Island College Faculty Research Committee. The author thanks Matthew Richardson, an anonymous reviewer, D. H. Whalen, Saudamini Roy, Julie Brown, Steve Frost, Doug Honorof, Marianne Pouplier, Ken Pugh, Einar Mencl, Jay Rueckl, and Charles Yang, for helpful discussions and technical assistance.
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Magen, H.S. A Behavioral Study of Regularity, Irregularity and Rules in the English Past Tense. J Psycholinguist Res 43, 791–814 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9276-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9276-0