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The proposition that the mental lexicon is a ‘dual route’ system, advanced by Pinker and others to account for regular and irregular morphology, overlooks the important fact that morphological regularity correlates inversely with phonological regularity --‘regular’ past-tense beeped being phonologically irregular (exceptional syllable), while ‘irregular’ past-tense kept is phonologically just r...

The English past tense is a quasi-regular system, in that many of the irregular verbs share characteristics with regular items. Among high-frequency exceptions, in particular, several have the regular /d/ or /t/ ending but with either a reduction of the vowel (did, said) or a deletion of a stem consonant (had, made). Such forms suggest that many so-called irregular verbs reflect a joint influen...

Is language governed by formal rules or by analogy to stored exemplars? The acquisition of the English past tense has long played a central role in this debate. In the present study, children rated the acceptability of a regular and an irregular past-tense form of each of 40 novel verbs (e.g., fleeped, flept) using a 5-point scale. The novel verbs were chosen to vary continuously along the orth...

The production of regular and irregular past tense forms was investigated among the members of an English-speaking family with a hereditary disorder of language. Unlike the control subjects, the family members affected by the disorder failed to generate overregularizations (e.g., digged) or novel regular forms (plammed, crived), whereas they did produce novel irregularizations (crive– crove). T...

This article presents fMRI evidence bearing on dual-mechanism versus connectionist theories of inflectional morphology. Ten participants were scanned at 4 Tesla as they covertly generated the past tenses of real and nonce (nonword) verbs presented auditorily. Regular past tenses (e.g., walked, wugged) and irregular past tenses (e.g., took, slept) produced similar patterns of activation in the p...

In this paper we add to what is known about the tense-marking limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) by exploring the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense, encompassing the age range of 2;6 to 8;9 (years;months) and comparing the performance of 21 children with SLI to that of 23 control children of the same age and 20 younger control children of equivalent me...

If neuronal models are successful, they will account for specifically human complex behaviours. Most of these behaviours can be described as governed by rules. In recent years, much effort has been spent to elucidate the neuronal basis of rules, and many researchers have focussed on modelling rules and regularities underlying language, particularly those relevant for past-tense formation. After...