Abstract
How regular and irregular verbs are processed remains a matter of debate. Some English-speaking patients with nonfluent aphasia are especially impaired on regular past-tense forms like played, whether the task requires production, comprehension or even the judgement that “play” and “played” sound different. Within a dual-mechanism account of inflectional morphology, these deficits reflect disruption to the rule-based process that adds (or strips) the suffix -ed to regular verb stems; but the fact that the patients are also impaired at detecting the difference between word pairs like “tray” and “trade” (the latter being a phonological but not a morphological twin to “played”) suggests an important role for phonological characteristics of the regular past tense. The present study examined MEG brain responses in healthy participants evoked by spoken regular past-tense forms and phonological twin words (plus twin pseudowords and a non-speech control) presented in a passive oddball paradigm. Deviant forms (played, trade, kwade/kwayed) relative to their standards (play, tray, kway) elicited a pronounced neuromagnetic response at approximately 130ms after the onset of the affix; this response was maximal at sensors over temporal areas of both hemispheres but stronger on the left, especially for played and kwayed. Relative to the same standards, a different set of deviants ending in /t/―—plate, trait and kwate—―produced stronger difference responses especially over the right hemisphere. Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-mechanism theories of past tense processing and the need to consider neurobiological evidence in attempts to understand inflectional morphology.
Highlights
Introduction‘‘I played chess until 1 am and slept late this morning’’
In everyday conversation, much of what we say refers to past events
Across the four conditions for trials where the deviant stimuli ended in /d/, the first contrast was between the two deviants that are or plausibly affixed (PLAYED and KWAYED) vs. those unlikely to be treated in that fashion (TRADE because it is a known monomorphemic word and the non-speech deviant because it is not a recognisable word or pseudoword)
Summary
‘‘I played chess until 1 am and slept late this morning’’. Despite the seeming ordinariness of this phenomenon, the procedures by which we produce and comprehend the past-tense forms of the verbs in our vocabulary are much debated in cognitive science and neuroscience. The majority of English verbs are so-called regular because they form their past tenses via a consistent transformation to the stem: the morpheme -ed is always added to the orthographic form (e.g., PLAYED, PRESSED, PLANTED) and is realised as one of those three allophones (/d/, /t/, or /Id/) in speech, depending on the phonetic characteristics of the final phoneme of the stem. There are, exceptions to this typical pattern: approximately 180 monomorphemic irregular n Corresponding author at: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK.
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