Lexical entries and rules of language: A multidisciplinary study of German inflection

Abstract

Following much work in linguistic theory, it is hypothesized that the language faculty has a modular structure and consists of two basic components, a lexicon of (structured) entries and a computational system of combinatorial operations to form larger linguistic expressions from lexical entries. This target article provides evidence for the dual nature of the language faculty by describing recent results of a multidisciplinary investigation of German inflection. We have examined: (1) its linguistic representation, focussing on noun plurals and verb inflection (participles), (2) processes involved in the way adults produce and comprehend inflected words, (3) brain potentials generated during the processing of inflected words, and (4) the way children acquire and use inflection. It will be shown that the evidence from all these sources converges and supports the distinction between lexical entries and combinatorial operations.Our experimental results indicate that adults have access to two distinct processing routes, one accessing (irregularly) inflected entries from the mental lexicon and another involving morphological decomposition of (regularly) inflected words into stem+affix representations. These two processing routes correspond to the dual structure of the linguistic system. Results from event-related potentials confirm this linguistic distinction at the level of brain structures. In children's language, we have also found these two processes to be clearly dissociated; regular and irregular inflection are used under different circumstances, and the constraints under which children apply them are identical to those of the adult linguistic system.Our findings will be explained in terms of a linguistic model that maintains the distinction between the lexicon and the computational system but replaces the traditional view of the lexicon as a simple list of idiosyncrasies with the notion of internally structured lexical representations.

Models of spoken‐word recognition

“…The main question with respect to morphological structure in lexical activation is whether morphologically complex words are stored as whole forms that do not reflect their morphological complexity (full listing 96 ), as multiple morphemes with separate access representations (full parsing 97 ), or that storage depends on the regularity of the morphological forms (dual-route 98,99 ). Although most of the research on morphology has been done with reading, a considerable amount of research by now has been conducted in the auditory domain (see Refs 100 and 101 for reviews); form priming 102 and word reconstruction 103 are typical tasks to investigate morphological processing in the auditory domain.…”

Morphology and Language Acquisition

“…The Wug test is now extensively used in a wide range of studies (see e.g., Bybee and Slobin 1982;Bybee and Moder 1983;Marcus et al 1992;Clahsen 1999;Hahn and Nakisa 2000;Albright and Hayes 2003;Hahn and Nakisa 2000;Hayes et al 2009;Zhang and Lai 2010;Becker et al 2011) which subsequently have had considerable influence in linguistic theorizing (Pinker 1989;Tomasello 2003;Taylor 2003;Hay and Baayen 2005). Yet the Wug test by no means provides a direct window into morphology.…”

“…This type of evidence has been accumulating from research on the Words and Rules model of morphology (Pinker 1999;Clahsen 1999), for which a categorical distinction between regular and irregular processes is of central importance. The evidence is unequivocal.…”

“…In a series of studies, Clahsen and colleagues (Clahsen and Rothweiler 1993;Weyerts and Clahsen 1994;Clahsen 1999) find that children across all age groups overapply the -t suffix to the irregulars, where the reverse usage is virtually absent. Their longitudinal data contains 116 incorrect participle endings, out of which 93% are -t errors (*gekommt instead of gekommen "come").…”

A aquisição da morfologia de verbos regulares no português brasileiro: uma abordagem da lingüística cognitiva

“…De acordo com um desses pontos de vista -de caráter claramente gerativista -a aquisição morfossintática é guiada por um conhecimento lingüístico inato (e.g., Clahsen, 1999;Hoekstra & Hyams, 1998;Poeppel & Wexler, 1993;Wexler, 1998). Esse ponto de vista assume que as crianças devem ser altamente produtivas desde os primeiros estágios do processo de aquisição da linguagem.…”