Regularity and irregularity in Frenchverbal inflection

Abstract

Can regular and irregular verb forms be accommodated by a single representational mechanism or is a dual mechanism account required? In a first experiment, we used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to investigate the mental representation of regular and irregular verb forms in French. Participants heard a spoken prime (such as aimons, ‘we love’) immediately followed by lexical decision to a visual probe (such as aimer, ‘to love’). We contrasted four types of French verbs, varying in the regularity and degree of allomorphy of their verb form inflection. These were (i) fully regular verbs (aimons/aimer, ‘we love/to love’) (ii) regular verbs that undergo minor and phonologically predictable allomorphic changes (sèment/semer, ‘they sow/to sow’) (iii) irregular verbs exhibiting subregularities (peignent/peindre, ‘they paint/to paint’) and (iv) irregular verbs with idiosyncratic alternations (vont/aller, ‘they go/to go’). The infinitive forms of these verbs were presented as targets in three prime conditions, preceded either by a regular form, an allomorphic form (except for the fuller regular verbs), or an unrelated prime. Morphologically related primes significantly facilitated lexical decision responses for all four verb classes, irrespective of regularity and allomorphy. The same pattern of results was observed in a second experiment using a masked priming paradigm. These results contrasted with English, where regularly inflected verbs prime their stems but irregular verbs do not. We argue that this reflects cross-linguistic differences in the morphophonological decomposability of French irregular forms, and that the current results enable us to deconfound regularity/irregularity distinctions from language-specific morphophonological differences.