I recommend the rule “if in doubt use the present tense”. Higham (1998), [1], §4.29 The present tense works well for scientific writing. The eternal truths we present in an article should all be in the present tense: instead of “experiments have shown that”, prefer “experiments show that”. The present tense helps make more active writing. Write derivations in the present tense: not the past ten...

This quasi-experimental study set out to examine the effect of peer corrective feedback on feedback givers and receivers in L2 writing. The forms in focus were a/an, the, and the past tense.The study was conducted in an EFL classroom setting with 45 learners of English in three writing classes which served as the feedback givers, receivers, and the control group.  Over four sessions of treatmen...

First-Order Induction of Decision Lists (FOIDL) is a new ILP method developed as a result of the failure of existing ILP methods when applied to the learning of past tense of English verbs. Using intentional knowledge representation, output completeness, and first-order decision lists, it can learn highly accurate rules for the past tense problem but with some drawbacks. In this paper, we prese...

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...

In the debate over the power of connectionist models to handle linguistic phenomena, considerable attention has been focused on the learning of simple morphophonemic rules. Rumelhart and McClelland’s celebrated model of the acquisition of the English past tense (1986), which used a simple pattern associator to learn mappings from stems to past tense forms, was advanced as evidence that networks...

This study tested the production of tensed finite verbs and participles referring to the past and future in agrammatic speakers of Turkish. The agrammatic speakers did not make more time reference errors in tensed verbs than in participles. This is interesting because tense in general cannot therefore be the main problem, since time reference for participles lacking tense inflection is as diffi...

We compare three types of dual-route associative architectures for learning the English past tense problem. Identical computational resources are used in (1) a pre-specified modular architecture, with a rule mechanism and an exception mechanism; (2) an architecture with two mechanisms that demonstrate emergent specialization of function for regular and exception verbs; and (3) a redundant syste...

Brain imaging studies of English past tense inflection have found dissociations between regular and irregular verbs, but no coherent picture has emerged to explain how these dissociations arise. Here we use synthetic brain imaging on a neural network model to provide a mechanistic account of how regional dissociations between regular and irregular processing in adults can emerge in a single mec...

The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has long been a testing ground for different models of inflection in the mental lexicon. According to the dual-system view, regular forms are generated by a rule and irregular forms are retrieved from memory. The single-system view postulates a single integrated system for all forms. Behavioral studies examined a variety of languages, but...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was severely impaired. To account for the observed tense...