UNLABELLED The acquisition of tense inflection is a gradual process, and the children appear unaware of the significance of inflectional endings, without recognizing that there is a general rule for deriving one form from another. PURPOSE To investigate the ability of past tense in children with normal language development (NLD). METHODS The subjects were 30 children with NLD, aged between ...

Contemporary theories of language production disagree about the cognitive mechanisms involved in the production of past tense forms of regular and irregular verbs. Two models compete to explain this process: Dual-route and Single-route. The present study tests these models using previously reported methods of production and naturalness rating of the past tense forms of novel verbs. Overall, par...

This study evaluates the input-processing deŽcit/single system and the grammar-speciŽc deŽcit/dual system models to account for past tense formation in impaired and normal language development. We investigated regular and irregular past tense formation of 60 real and novel regular and irregular verbs in ‘‘Grammatical (G)-SLI’’ children (aged 9:3 to 12:10) and morphologicalor vocabulary-matched ...

Theoretical accounts of the processing of inflectional morphology make implicit, untested assumptions about the activation of verb semantics from inflected verbs. This research used semantic priming to investigate the extent to which regular and irregular past tense forms activate verb semantics, in comparison to the verb stem. The results show that past tense forms activate verb semantics to t...

According to the Dual-Mechanism Model (Pinker & Prince, 1988), the processing of language is based upon two fundamentally different components: a rule component and an associative memory. The aim of this study was to analyze whether the theoretical tenets of the Dual-Mechanism Model, which has originally been established as a model of L1 processing, can be extended to the processing of L2 morph...

It has been suggested that damage to anterior regions of the left hemisphere results in a dissociation in the perception and lexical activation of past-tense forms. Specifically, in a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets, such patients demonstrate significant priming for irregular verbs (spoke-speak), but, unlike control participants, fail t...

Are the linguistic forms that are memorized in the mental lexicon and those that are specified by the rules of grammar subserved by distinct neurocognitive systems or by a single computational system with relatively broad anatomic distribution? On a dual-system view, the productive -ed-suffixation of English regular past tense forms (e.g., look-looked) depends upon the mental grammar, whereas i...