Older adults, individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT), and individuals with semantic dementia (SD) produced the past tense of verbs based on present-tense carrier sentences (e.g., Everyday I ding the bell. Yesterday I_____the bell). Both regularity (i.e., whether or not -ed is used for the past tense) and consistency (i.e., the degree to which verbs of similar orthography and ph...

Neuropsychological research showing that the regular ("jump-jumped") and irregular ("drive/drove") past tense inflectional morphology can dissociate following brain damage has been important in testing claims about the cognitive and neural status of linguistic rules. These dissociations have been interpreted as evidence for two different computational systems-a rule-based system underlying the ...

How regular and irregular verbs are processed remains a matter of debate. Some English-speaking patients with nonfluent aphasia are especially impaired on regular past-tense forms like played, whether the task requires production, comprehension or even the judgement that "play" and "played" sound different. Within a dual-mechanism account of inflectional morphology, these deficits reflect disru...

succinctly restate their position that the English past tense is governed by two competing mechanisms, identified as 'words and rules', and taken as examples of distinct procedural and declarative systems. Their mechanisms work separately, so that only one or the other is responsible for yielding a particular past tense form. To produce the past tense of keep, words and rules race to generate a...

Studies of English have shown that temporal-lobe patients, including those with Alzheimer's disease, are spared at processing real and novel regular inflected forms (e.g., walk-->walked; blick-->blicked), but impaired at real and novel irregular forms (e.g., dig-->dug; spling-->splang). Here we extend the investigation cross-linguistically to the more complex system of Italian verbal morphology...

The regular and irregular past tense has become a focus for recent debates about the structure of the language processing system, asking whether language functions are subserved by different neural and functional mechanisms or whether all processes can be accommodated within a single unified system. A critical claim of leading single mechanism accounts is that the relationship between an irregu...

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from sixteen healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes...

The productive use of English past tense morphology in school-aged children (N= 74; 3 years, 8 months to 13 years, 5 months) is explored using on elicited production task. Errors represented 20% of the responses overall. Virtually all of the children demonstrated productivity with regular (e.g., good) and irregular patterns (zero-marking, e.g., sit + sit; vowel-change, e.g., ride -+ rid). Overa...

OBJECTIVES Evidence of systematic double-dissociations of neural activity associated with the generation of regular and irregular past tense in healthy individuals may prove decisive in distinguishing between single- and dual-route models of morphological processing, because the former (connectionist models of morphological processing) have only been able to simulate double-dissociations of pas...