Past Forms Research Articles

Spelling Dutch Doublets: Children's Learning of a Phonological and Morphological Spelling Rule

This study addresses the question of why spellings determined by morphology are relatively hard to acquire by presenting a latent class model of children's acquisition of a doublet of consonants in the spelling of Dutch verbs. This spelling pattern can be determined either by a phonological rule (after a short vowel, a doublet is spelled) or a morphological rule (doublets are spelled in past-tense forms). The results show that the youngest group of spellers identified by latent class analysis predominantly used an alphabetic strategy. They did not spell doublets at all. The latent class model further shows that the acquisition of phonologically determined spellings occurred at a lower average age than the acquisition of morphologically determined spellings. The latter led to overgeneralizations, and a U-shaped developmental pattern was found as a consequence of these overgeneralizations. Children over generalized doublets for different reasons. At younger ages, overgeneralizations of doublets occurred because children treated the doublet as a phonological alternative to the singleton, whereas at older ages, overgeneralizations of doublets were confined to homophones, indicating lexical effects.

Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn–DRAW), irregular change stem (ran–RUN), and regular past tense–present tense verb pairs that were either low (guided–GUIDE) or high (pushed–PUSH) in resonance, a measure of semantic richness. Overall, semantic richness of irregular verbs (nested and irregular change) and of regular verbs (high and low resonance) was matched. Native speakers of English revealed comparable facilitation across regularity and greater facilitation for nested than change stem irregulars. Like native speakers, Serbian, but not Chinese bilinguals matched for proficiency, showed facilitation due to form overlap between irregular past and present tense forms with a nested stem. Unlike native speakers, neither group showed reliable facilitation to stem change irregulars. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on inflectional processing in a second language.

Children’s overtensing errors: Phonological and lexical effects on syntax

Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. ∗ didn’t br o ke for target didn’t br ea k) is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when phonological processing biases favour the past-tense form relative to the base form (vowel dominance and the consonant addition bias). For regulars, errors are more common when the inflected form ends in a rime that can occur in monomorphemic forms in English (which children have had independent practice with) than when the rime is found only in inflected forms. Results demonstrate that default patterns can be subject to lexical frequency effects. Results are compatible with a particular conceptualization of competition (the integrated multiple competitor approach), whether connectionist or symbolic.

The Effect of Temporal Adverbials on Past Tense Production by Children With Specific Language Impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often fail to produce past tense forms in obligatory contexts, although the factors affecting such inconsistency are not well understood. This study examined the influence of accompanying temporal adverbials (e.g., just, already) on the past tense production of these children. Fifteen preschool-aged children with SLI, 15 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A) and 15 younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) participated in the study. The children responded to probes that obligated the use of past tense forms. The verbal context provided by the experimenter for half of the items included a temporal adverbial. Overall, the SLI and TD-MLU groups produced past tense less frequently than the children in the TD-A group, and there were no significant differences between the SLI and the TD-MLU groups. However, both the SLI and the TD-MLU participants produced past tense forms less frequently when temporal adverbials were included than when they were absent. These findings suggest that the tendency to use past tense by the children with SLI and their younger MLU-matched peers may not have been independent of other types of temporal information.

Disociación entre pacientes agramáticos y anómicos en la producción de formas verbales

Electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies suggest that regular and irregular verbs are differently represented in the brain. Findings from studies of patients seem to agree with this view, but there are discordant data. To test if there is a dissociation in regular and irregular verb processing between patients with anterior lesions, characterized as Broca's aphasics, and patients with posterior lesions, characterized as anomics. 10 aphasic patients participated in the study: five presenting evidence of Broca's aphasia and five presenting evidence of anomia. The task required patients to complete 58 sentences with a verb conjugated in the past tense form. 29 sentences required an irregular verb and 29 required a regular verb. Statistical analyses indicate a main effect due to differences between the different types of patients, and an interaction between this effect of patient type and the effect of verb type. The interaction was due to the fact that anomic patients had more difficulty in completing sentences using irregular verbs. The results of this study support a dual route model, which assumes that regular verbs are processed by application of morphological rules whereas irregular verbs are processed through the addressed recovery of conjugated forms.

The impact of phonological complexity on past tense inflection in children with Grammatical-SLI

English-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) variably produce inflected and bare stem forms in obligatory past tense contexts. Researchers have not reached consensus as to whether the underlying deficit is morphosyntactic or morphophonological in nature. The Computational Grammatical Complexity (CGC) Hypothesis takes a different tack: it hypothesizes that for children with a particular form of SLI, Grammatical-SLI, the deficit is in representing linguistic structural complexity in at least three components of the computational grammatical system – syntax, morphology and phonology. Deficits in all these components are predicted to impact on regular past tense formation. The impact of syntactic and morphological complexity on G-SLI children's realization of tense has been tested previously. Here we complete the picture by considering phonological effects on their production of regular past tense inflection. Using a past tense elicitation task where we manipulate the phonological complex...

Speeded processing of grammar and tool knowledge in Tourette's syndrome

Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a developmental disorder characterized by motor and verbal tics. The tics, which are fast and involuntary, result from frontal/basal-ganglia abnormalities that lead to unsuppressed behaviors. Language has not been carefully examined in TS. We tested the processing of two basic aspects of language: idiosyncratic and rule-governed linguistic knowledge. Evidence suggests that idiosyncratic knowledge (e.g., in irregular past tense formation; bring–brought) is stored in a mental lexicon that depends on the temporal-lobe-based declarative memory system that also underlies conceptual knowledge. In contrast, evidence suggests that rule-governed combination (e.g., in regular past tenses; walk + - ed) takes place in a mental grammar that relies on the frontal/basal-ganglia-based procedural memory system, which also underlies motor skills such as how to use a hammer. We found that TS children were significantly faster than typically developing control children in producing rule-governed past tenses ( slip–slipped, plim–plimmed, bring–bringed) but not irregular and other unpredictable past tenses ( bring–brought, splim–splam). They were also faster than controls in naming pictures of manipulated ( hammer) but not non-manipulated ( elephant) items. These data were not explained by a wide range of potentially confounding subject- and item-level factors. The results suggest that the processing of procedurally based knowledge, both of grammar and of manipulated objects, is particularly speeded in TS. The frontal/basal-ganglia abnormalities may thus lead not only to tics, but also to a wider range of rapid behaviors, including the cognitive processing of rule-governed forms in language and other types of procedural knowledge.

An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs (“regulars”) is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, “irregular” English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over midline parietal sites (P600s), and seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory.

Morphophonological structure and agrammatic regular/irregular past-tense production

One criticism of both singleand dual-route models of regular/irregular inflection is that the proposal that irregulars are stored fails to account for regularities in the structure of irregular forms (see Embick & Marantz, 2005). Far from showing the sort of arbitrary variation allowed by storage, most irregular forms are phonologically similar to their stems and, in many cases, to regularly inflected forms (e.g., many English irregular past forms end in the affixes –d or –t: made, left, slept). This has led many to conclude that nearly all irregular forms are generated via affixation and stem Readjustment rather than storage and retrieval (Chomsky & Halle, 1968; Halle & Marantz, 1993). On such views, English past-tense forms vary along two dimensions: (i) whether their affixes are phonologically realized or phonologically null (‘‘zero affixes’’), and (ii) whether or not the stem undergoes Readjustment following affixation. Overtly affixed and Readjusted past forms are irregulars such as slept, made; overtly affixed and non-Readjusted past forms are simply regulars. Zero-affixed and Readjusted past forms are irregulars like gave, sang; zero-affixed and non-Readjusted past forms are irregulars identical to their stems (e.g., hit). In English, zero-affixed irregulars constitute a large percentage of irregular past-tense forms. Could the proposed agrammatic preference for English irregular forms (e.g., Ullman et al., 2005) reflect a preference for zero affixes over overt affixes? Most studies of English regular and irregular past tense have not distinguished overtly affixed and zero-affixed irregulars, but Ullman et al. (2005) report that an anterior aphasic patient produced 80% of zero-affixed forms correctly, while producing only 50% of overtly affixed forms correctly (cf. 20% of regulars correct). Given the general proposal that agrammatic aphasia reflects impaired phonological spellout of morphosyntactic features (Fix, 2005), we hypothesized that past-tense forms with overt affixation (including both regulars and overtly affixed irregulars) should be more difficult for agrammatic speakers than forms with zero affixation. Method

Morpho-syntactic and morpho-phonological deficits in the production of regularly and irregularly inflected verbs

Background: The background to the study is the debate in relation to the English regular/irregular past tense forms.Aims: The purpose of the investigation was the evaluation of the dual mechanism (DMT: Pinker, 1999; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1997, 1998; Ullman, Corkin, Coppola, Hickok, Growdon, Koroshetz, et al., 1997) and connectionist single mechanism models (SMT: Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003; Joanisse & Seidenberg, 1999; Patterson, Lambon Ralph, Hodges, & McClelland, 2001) through exploring the reading and oral production of regular and irregular past tense forms and other verbal and nominal inflections by a Broca's type aphasic and phonological dyslexic patient.Methods & Procedures: Eight experimental tasks are reported. Three involved the reading of stems and inflected verbs and nouns in differently organised lists, two involved the oral production of past tense verbs and plural nouns, and three explored the ability to distinguish between written verbs inflected with various affixes.Outcomes & Results: In reading randomly organised list of nouns, verb stems, and regular and irregular past tense forms the patient displayed dissociation between regular and irregular past tense forms as predicted by DMT. When the same items were presented in a list with present and past tense forms paired, and in the oral transformation task, the dissociation disappeared, and performance in regular and irregular past tense forms became comparable. There was a difference in the patient's reading of plural nouns and progressive verbs, which was good, and of past tense forms and third person forms, which was impaired. The recognition/comprehension tasks revealed that the patient was aware of the presence of an affix, but he could not reliably distinguish between different affixes.Conclusions: Performance on regular/irregular past tense forms and the variable levels of performance in producing different regular inflections are in conflict with both DMT and SMT on a number of grounds. The task-related differences between randomly organised lists and paired present and past tense forms are accounted for by distinguishing between morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic effects. It is argued that deficits confined to the production of regular past tense forms are morpho-phonological in nature, while deficits in both regular and irregular past tense forms originate in morpho-syntax. Since SMT and DMT are theories of morpho-phonological processes, they cannot account for the complex performance pattern presented by the patient in the present study and by other similar patients. The differences attested in the availability of differently affixed words and deficits in irregular past tense forms are only accountable at the level of morpho-syntax.

Feedback, Noticing and Instructed Second Language Learning

Second language acquisition researchers have claimed that feedback provided during conversational interaction facilitates second language (L2) acquisition. A number of experimental studies have supported this claim, connecting interactional feedback with L2 development. Researchers have suggested that interactional feedback is associated with L2 learning because it prompts learners to notice L2 forms. This study explores the relationships between feedback, instructed ESL learners’ noticing of L2 form during classroom interactions and their subsequent L2 development. Interactional feedback was provided to learners in response to their production problems with questions, plurals, and past tense forms. Learners’ noticing was assessed through on-line learning journals, introspective comments while viewing classroom videotapes, and questionnaire responses. Through a controlled pre-test, post-test design, analyses of noticing and learning were carried out for each learner. The results point to an interesting, complex and positive relationship between interactional feedback in the classroom, the learners’ reports about noticing and their learning of L2 question forms.

The evolution of genomes and language

The evolution of genomes and language

Verb morphology in second language versus third language acquisition

This paper reports an experimental study on L2 vs. L3 Spanish morphological representation. A total of 19 Spanish learners (10 Chinese native speakers who are upper intermediate to advanced L2 English users as well as 9 English native speakers who do not speak a prior language without overt morphology) participated in the study. A written production task using Spanish nonce verbs was used to elicit regular and irregular forms of Spanish past participles. The study revealed differences between native and non-native Spanish speakers but ones that are still compatible with an approach which posits a dual mechanism for morphological processing. In addition, no principal difference between the L2 and the L3 Spanish learners was identified. A follow-up experiment on L2 English was therefore carried out testing 26 native speakers of Chinese and 17 native speakers of English using a written production task eliciting English regular and irregular past tense forms for both real verbs and nonce verbs. The findings suggested that native and non-native English speakers’ performances pattern similarly. It seems that L2 English plays a crucial role in Chinese speakers’ L3 Spanish morphological representation and in their similar performance to the L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers.

Deictic projection: An inquiry into the future‐oriented past tense in Persian*

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the Persian past tense form is projected into the future to designate events, states, and processes. While it must be admitted that the phenomenon under consideration is by no means confined to Persian, its examination in this language will reveal certain characteristics which are likely to contribute to a better understanding of how temporal deixis, together with aspectual and modal meanings, interact with contextual factors to yield socio‐culturally relevant utterances. Of special theoretical interest in this respect are the semantic‐pragmatic constraints levied, in varying degrees, on the projected tense in terms of negation, pronominal choice, speech act assignment, aspectual character, modal status, and pitch contour. Fundamental to the present study are three assumptions. First, the deictic projection at issue has pragmatic motivations, and, in addition, stems largely from the ontological asymmetry between pastness and futurity. Second, it has an indisputable edge over the other future‐indicating devices available to Persian speakers in that it denotes factivity with respect to the occurrence of a situation. And third, it is stylistically marked as it digresses from the normal function of the past tense. “And of all the various aspects of time, it is its tensed aspect, the fact that we experience time in terms of a transient now, which is the most promiscuous.” (Robin Le Poidevin, 1998:10)

FMRI of Past Tense Processing: The Effects of Phonological Complexity and Task Difficulty

Abstract The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has been an important issue in cognitive science and has been used to advance different models of the organization of language in the brain. The dual-system view holds that the regular past tense forms are generated by a rule while irregular forms are retrieved from memory. The single-system view, on the other hand, holds that both forms are generated by a single integrated system and differ only in their reliance on factors such as phonology and semantics. We conducted an event-related fMRI study to examine the activation patterns associated with the generation and reading of regular and irregular past tense forms, in addition to the reading of their stems. Regular and irregular past tense generation activated similar brain regions compared to the reading of their respective stems. The areas activated more for irregular generation compared to regular generation included inferior frontal, precentral, and parietal regions bilaterally. This activation can be interpreted as reflecting the greater attentional and response selection demands of irregular generation. Compared to irregular generation, regular generation activated a small region in the left superior temporal gyrus when the regular and irregular past tense forms were mismatched on phonological complexity. No areas were more activated for regulars than irregulars when the past tense forms were matched on this variable. This suggests that the activation specific to regulars was related to the higher phonological complexity of their past tense forms rather than to their generation. A contrast of the reading of regular and irregular past tense forms was consistent with this hypothesis. These results support a single-system account of past tense generation.

FMRI of Past Tense Processing: The Effects of Phonological Complexity and Task Difficulty

The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has been an important issue in cognitive science and has been used to advance different models of the organization of language in the brain. The dual-system view holds that the regular past tense forms are generated by a rule while irregular forms are retrieved from memory. The single-system view, on the other hand, holds that both forms are generated by a single integrated system and differ only in their reliance on factors such as phonology and semantics. We conducted an event-related fMRI study to examine the activation patterns associated with the generation and reading of regular and irregular past tense forms, in addition to the reading of their stems. Regular and irregular past tense generation activated similar brain regions compared to the reading of their respective stems. The areas activated more for irregular generation compared to regular generation included inferior frontal, precentral, and parietal regions bilaterally. This activation can be interpreted as reflecting the greater attentional and response selection demands of irregular generation. Compared to irregular generation, regular generation activated a small region in the left superior temporal gyrus when the regular and irregular past tense forms were mismatched on phonological complexity. No areas were more activated for regulars than irregulars when the past tense forms were matched on this variable. This suggests that the activation specific to regulars was related to the higher phonological complexity of their past tense forms rather than to their generation. A contrast of the reading of regular and irregular past tense forms was consistent with this hypothesis. These results support a single-system account of past tense generation.

Past tense formation in Greek children with Williams syndrome

Background Psycholinguistic studies of past-tense forms in English and other languages have been the focus of a controversy on the role of morphological rules and computation for acquisition and processing of inflected word forms. In contrast to single-mechanism accounts (e.g. Plunkett and Marchman 1996) in which morphological rules do not play any direct role for acquisition or processing, dualmechanism accounts (Clahsen 1999) claim that regular inflection is rule-based (e.g. -ed suffixation in English), whereas irregular forms (e.g. ate) are stored and retrieved from lexical memory. Research on developmental disorders offered new insights into the past-tense debate. Clahsen and colleagues have suggested that children with Williams Syndrome (WS) employ the morphological rules to compensate for irregulars in the lexical system yielding, for example, excessive rates of -ed overregularization (Clahsen and Almazan 1998). By contrast, Thomas et al. (2001) have argued against that view and have claimed instead that language is broadly delayed in WS and develops under a different set of constraints from normal.

Does past tense marking indicate the acquisition of the concept of temporal displacement in children's cognitive development?

The acquisition of past tense markers has often been considered to parallel conceptual development in the domain of time (e.g., Weist, 1986). However, the precise relationship between linguistic marking of time in childrenís speech and conceptual development has not been investigated in data-based research. This study analyses longitudinal speech data from four Japanese children to determine whether the use of the past tense form actually coincides with its use to signal past time. The results show that the relationship between contrastive use of the form and truly deictic past is not a straightforward one; for all the children, deictic use emerges later than the contrastive use of past and nonpast forms.

Why girls say ‘holded’ more than boys

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female superiority in aspects of lexical memory. Other neurocognitive models of language have not made this prediction. Here we examine the prediction in past-tense over-regularizations (e.g. holded) produced by children. We expected that girls would remember irregular past-tense forms (held) better than boys, and thus would over-regularize less. To our surprise, girls over-regularized far more than boys. We investigated potential explanations for this sex difference. Analyses showed that in girls but not boys, over-regularization rates correlated with measures of the number of similar-sounding regulars (folded, molded). This sex difference in phonological neighborhood effects is taken to suggest that girls tend to produce over-regularizations in associative lexical memory, generalizing over stored neighboring regulars, while boys are more likely to depend upon rule-governed affixation (hold+-ed). The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that, likely due to their superior lexical abilities, females tend to retrieve from memory complex forms (walked) that men generally compose with the grammatical system (walk+-ed). The results suggest that sex may be an important factor in the acquisition and computation of language.

Semantic Density and Past-Tense Formation in Three Germanic Languages

It is widely believed that the difference between regular and irregular verbs is restricted to form. This study questions that belief. We report a series of lexical statistics showing that irregular verbs cluster in denser regions in semantic space. Compared to regular verbs, irregular verbs tend to have more semantic neighbors that in turn have relatively many other semantic neighbors that are morphologically irregular. We show that this greater semantic density for irregulars is reflected in association norms, familiarity ratings, visual lexical-decision latencies, and word-naming latencies. Meta-analyses of the materials of two neuroimaging studies show that in these studies, regularity is confounded with differences in semantic density. Our results challenge the hypothesis of the supposed formal encapsulation of rules of inflection and support lines of research in which sensitivity to probability is recognized as intrinsic to human language.