A Cognitive Interpretation for Non-Past Uses of the Simple Past Tense

The past tense inflection project (PTIP): speeded past tense inflections, imageability ratings, and past tense consistency measures for 2,200 verbs.

The processes involved in past tense verb generation have been central to models of inflectional morphology. However, the empirical support for such models has often been based on studies of accuracy in past tense verb formation on a relatively small set of items. We present the first large-scale study of past tense inflection (the Past Tense Inflection Project, or PTIP) that affords response t...

Past tense in the brain's time: Neurophysiological evidence for dual-route processing of past-tense verbs

A controversial issue in neuro- and psycholinguistics is whether regular past-tense forms of verbs are stored lexically or generated productively by the application of abstract combinatorial schemas, for example affixation rules. The success or failure of models in accounting for this particular issue can be used to draw more general conclusions about cognition and the degree to which abstract,...

Past tense route priming.

The present research examined whether lexical (whole word) or more rule-based (morphological constituent) processes can be locally biased by experimental list context in past tense verb inflection. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults completed a past tense inflection task in which list context was manipulated across blocks containing regular past tense verbs (e.g. REACH-REACHED) or irregu...

The past and future of the past tense.

What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-te...

Past Tense Learning