Phonological priming and irregular past

Specific language impairment as a syntax-phonology (PF) interface problem: evidence from Afrikaans

“…13 Our approach is corroborated by recent insights from the field of experimental psycholinguistic studies on morphology. Experimental data seem to support theories claiming that regular inflected forms are not computed in speaking by adding affixes to roots, but are retrieved in their complete form from the lexicon (e.g., Stemberger 2004). Both irregular and regular forms are accessed directly from the lexicon, which is in line with Word and Paradigm morphology (Blevins 2003).…”

Past-tense generation from form versus meaning: Behavioural data and simulation evidence

“…As noted earlier, fundamental to dual-mechanism theories like Words and Rules is the distinction between lexicon and grammar, and descriptions of inflectional processing typically begin with retrieval of the stem from the lexicon before application or blocking of the grammatical rule. These accounts rarely if ever seem to address the role of semantic information that must logically underlie past-tense production from meaning, and as a consequence “They have been vague about whether the basic phonological processing of the base form takes place first as a necessary step on the way towards generating the irregular form.” (Stemberger, 2004, p.83). Yet this issue is clearly critical when it comes to deriving predictions concerning the performance expected when participants are required to generate the past tense from meaning.…”

“…Data from the speech of children during language acquisition (Marcus et al, 1992) and of some neurological patients (Patterson et al, 2001), however, offer reasons to question this assumption. In these populations, regularisation errors in spontaneous speech are more likely to occur when there has been very recent exposure to the verb’s stem form, suggesting that the Stem Inflection task may artificially inflate the magnitude of the regularity effect, possibly as a result of phonological priming from the stem to an “add –ed” response (Marcus et al, 1992; Okrent, 2004; Ramscar, 2002; Stemberger, 2004). The aim of the present study was to determine whether the robust regularity effect observed in Stem Inflection holds when the task is to generate the past tense of a verb from an action picture, which we will refer to as Picture Inflection.…”

5: Storage And Computation In The Mental Lexicon

“…When it is less frequent, overtensing errors (felled for fall ) were more likely. These data suggest that the present and past tense forms are in competition, and that this competition is modulated by the a-priori probabilities of the vowels in these verb forms (see also Stemberger 2004). Tabak et al (2005b) obtained further evidence for competition between the past and present tense forms using a task in which subjects were shown a present or a past tense form, and were asked to say out loud the corresponding past or present tense form.…”