Mechanisms of Verb Inflection – Regular vs. Irregular or Easy vs. Hard?

We present a speeded production study of the English past tense that is designed to evaluate between conflicting theories of the mechanism of verb inflection. Test items are verbs that systematically differ in regularity but also in overall ease of processing as defined by a number of statistical and distributional factors. We show that overall ease, but not regularity, predicts differences in the response latencies of produced past tense forms in adults. These results indicate that the processing of inflections is best explained by a single, associative mechanism that is responsible for the production of all verbs.