and the English past tense

mine the nature of mental computation. Over the last decade the focus of this debate has been the contrast between classical views of mental computation, seen as the rule-based manipulation of strings of symbols with a syntax, as opposed to more distributed systems, operating subsymbolically and without syntax. Despite the pervasive and crucial nature of this debate, it has nonetheless been hard to find specific domains where empirical evidence could be generated that might decide between these two broad classes of views. The English past tense, perhaps surprisingly, offers one of the few cases where this seems to be true. Protagonists on both sides of the debate generally agree that the mental representation of the regular and irregular past tense of the English verb is a crucial test case. In this brief essay, we begin by explaining why this should be so, and then go on to focus on the recent emphasis, in our own work as well as in the work of others, on the neural correlates of the cognitive systems supporting the English past tense, and on the resulting claims for the neurological as well as functional dissociability of these underlying systems in the brain.