On the processing of regular and irregular forms of verbs and nouns: evidence from neuropsychology

Abstract

Following acquired brain damage, a native English speaking patient (AW) encountered problems accessing phonology in speech production, while her ability to access word meaning appeared to be intact. In a series of tasks, AW was presented either with a verb, and was asked to produce its past tense or past participle ( walk → “walked”), or with a noun, and was asked to produce its plural ( glove → “gloves”). A stark dissociation was found: while AW responded accurately with regular forms of verbs ( walked) and nouns ( gloves), performance was significantly less accurate with irregular forms ( found; children). The appearance of a selective deficit for irregular forms in conditions of impaired lexical access is in line with dual-mechanism accounts, which proposes that irregular forms are specified in the lexicon whereas regular forms are computed via rule-based mechanisms. In contrast, AW's data are problematic for connectionist accounts that do not posit separate mechanisms for processing regular and irregular forms, including the connectionist model recently proposed by Joanisse and Seidenberg ( Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96 (1999) 7592) which successfully simulated a variety of earlier neuropsychological findings. Analyses of AW's responses shed light on further details of the representation and processing of regular and irregular inflected forms.