Children’s acquisition of English past tense has been widely studied as testing ground for theories of language development, mostly because it comprises a set of quasi-regular mappings. English verbs are of two types: regular verbs, which form their past tense based on a productive rule, and irregular verbs, which form their past tenses through exceptions to that rule. Although many connectioni...

Two studies investigated 3- to 5-year-olds' trust in a reliable informant when judging novel labels and novel plural and past tense forms. In Study 1, children (N = 24) endorsed the names of new objects given by an informant who had earlier labeled familiar objects correctly over the names given by an informant who had labeled the same objects incorrectly. In Study 2, children (N = 24) endorsed...

A constructivist neural network model is presented that learns the past tense of English verbs. The model builds its architecture in response to the learning task in a way consistent with neurobiological and psychological evidence. The model outperforms existing connectionist and symbolic past tense models in terms of learning and generalization behavior, and it displays a U-shaped learning cur...

This research is case study which was designed to investigate the acquisition of tense by Persian and English speaking children between 2to4 years aged. Four girls were precisely analyzed in order to figure how the tense of verbs is effective in their speaking that learners need to succeed in their daily lives. The subjects were randomly selected to study and the matter of gender was not consid...

This paper discusses a subjunctive construction, namely, the past tense used for present state in Japanese (Teramura 1984). Unlike in Korean and other languages, the past tense marker “ta” can express an unexpected finding or remembrance at the speech time (Inoue and Ubukoshi 1997). I claim the existence of a covert antecedent clause in this construction, and that counterfactuality is involved ...

This article presents an investigation of the relationship between lesioning and neuroimaging methods of assessing functional specialisation, using synthetic brain imaging (SBI) and lesioning of a connectionist network of past-tense formation. The model comprised two processing 'routes': one was a direct route between layers of input and output units, while the other, indirect, route featured a...

To what extent does morphological structure play a role in early processing of visually presented English past tense verbs? Previous masked priming studies have demonstrated effects of obligatory form-based decomposition for genuinely affixed words (teacher-TEACH) and pseudo-affixed words (corner-CORN), but not for orthographic controls (brothel-BROTH). Additionally, MEG single word reading stu...

Pinker and colleagues propose two mechanisms - a rule system and a lexical memory - to form past tenses and other inflections. They predict that children's acquisition of the regular inflection is sudden; that the regular inflection applies uniformly regardless of phonological, semantic or other factors; and that the rule system is separably vulnerable to disruption. A connectionist account mak...