Is past tense production better modelled by a Single Mechanism or a Words and Rules model? We present data concerning a phenomenon that has not been considered by either model-regular past tense verbs with contrasting phonotactics. One set of verbs contains clusters at the inflected verb end that also occur in monomorphemic words ('monomorphemically legal clusters', MLC) whereas the other has c...

An impairment in generating regular relative to irregular past tense verbs has been noted in nonfluent aphasia. Dual mechanism accounts attribute this deficit to an impaired rule-based route responsible for stem affix (‘play’ + ‘ed’) operations, and spared retrieval of past tenses from lexical knowledge. In contrast, single mechanism accounts suggest that the dissociation reflects an impairment...

Theories of specific language impairment (SLI) in children turn on whether this deficit stems from a grammarspecific impairment or a more general speech-processing deficit. This issue parallels a more general question in cognitive neuroscience concerning the brain bases of linguistic rules. This more general debate frequently focuses on past-tense verbs, specifically, whether regular verbs (bak...

The clinical marker in specific language impairment (SLI) population is the subject of considerable debate. SLI is the one of the frequently diagnosed atypical language phenomena found among early school-age children (McArthur et al., 2000; Spear-Swerling, 2006). For example, children with SLI have difficulty applying the Past Tense rule to verbs, even though they can accurately repeat phonolog...

Regularly inflected forms often behave differently in language production than irregular forms. These differences are often used to argue that irregular forms are listed in the lexicon but regular forms are produced by rule. Using an experimental speech production task with adults, it is shown that overtensing errors, where a tensed verb is used in place of an infinitive, predominantly involve ...

The present study investigates the production of regular and irregular verbs in the past tense and the comprehension of passive sentences by Greek-speaking PD patients, and compares their behavior to that of normal speakers. Although the two groups manifest large scale differences at all the above constructions, the behavior of PDs is not different at regular vs. irregular past tense formation ...