This paper presents a corpus-based algorithm capable of inducing inflectional morphological analyses of both regular and highly irregular forms (such as brought→bring) from distributional patterns in large monolingual text with no direct supervision. The algorithm combines four original alignment models based on relative corpus frequency, contextual similarity, weighted string similarity and in...

study, taking truly independent ratings to see which verbs participants considered to be denominal or deverbal (i.e. exocentric or not). The results of this new experiment were clear. The semantic similarity (or otherwise) of verbs-incontext to ordinary irregular usage predicted the acceptability of past-tense forms. Whether or not verbs were perceived to be exocentric was irrelevant to this. I...

We present a Bayesian model of the mirror image problems of linguistic productivity and reuse. The model, known as Fragment Grammar, is evaluated against several morphological datasets; its performance is compared to competing theoretical accounts including full–parsing, full–listing, and exemplar–based models. The model is able to learn the correct patterns of productivity and reuse for two ve...

This study uses the masked priming procedure to compare the decompositionality of regular with irregular English past tense forms relative to both an unrelated baseline and a baseline matched on orthographic similarity to the morphological prime. Morphological facilitation varies with the degree of similarity between related primes and targets. Discrepancies between unrelated and orthographic b...

Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland have described a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense in English which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) and irregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of chi...

We use STAG to model the interaction between demonstratives and tense found in Blackfoot (Algonquian). In clauses with no tense or aspect marking, past tense can be encoded through a distal demonstrative on either the internal argument (transitives, unaccusatives) or the external argument (unergatives). A fourth class of predicate, semantically transitive but syntactically intransitive with a p...

The ability to comprehend and represent the temporal properties of an occurrence is a crucial aspect of human language and cognition. Despite advances in neurolinguistic research into semantic processing, surprisingly little is known regarding the mechanisms which support the comprehension of temporal semantics. We used fMRI to investigate neural activity associated with processing of concrete ...

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repet...

In a majority of languages, the time of an event is expressed by marking tense on the verb. There is substantial evidence that the production of verb tense in sentences is more severely impaired than other functional categories in persons with agrammatic aphasia. The underlying source of this verb tense impairment is less clear, particularly in terms of the relative contribution of conceptual-s...