Overtensing and the effect of regularity

Abstract

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 irregular forms, but that the differences may be due to phonological confounds, not to regularity per se. Errors involve vowel-changing irregular forms more than suffixing inflected forms, with at best a small difference between regular - ed and irregular - en. Frequency effects on overtensing errors require a model in which the past-tense and base forms of the verb are in competition and in which activation functions are nonlinear, and rule out models with specialized subnetworks for past-tense forms. Implications for theories of language production are discussed.