Past tense formation in Williams syndrome

Irregular past tense formation in English interlanguage

In 1983, when I attended my first linguistics course, taught by one Professor Rüdiger Zimmermann, Joan Bybee and Carol Moder published an article on „Morphological classes as natural categories“ in Language. In this article they argued that prototype theory can be applied to morphological classes, in particular ablaut classes in English verb morphology. Their experimental results indicated that...

The perfective past tense in Greek adolescents with Down syndrome.

This study investigates the ability of a group of eight Greek-speaking adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS) (aged 12.1-18.7) to handle the perfective past tense using an acceptability judgement task. The performance of the DS participants was compared with that of 16 typically-developing children whose chronological age was matched with the mental age of the DS group. For existing verbs, both gr...

A Distributed Model of the English Past Tense Formation

We developed a version of the Joanisse and Seidenberg (1999) past-tense model to address two issues: whether the model’s performance depended on the use of localist semantic representations, and the challenges to this account presented by a patient who was impaired in generating irregular past tenses despite apparently intact semantics. The model also demonstrates the frequency by regularity in...

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...

Past Tense Learning