Past Verbs Research Articles

Exceptional Rule Learning in a Longitudinal Case Study of Williams Syndrome: Acquisition of Past Tense

Conflicting reports of language ability in Williams syndrome (WS) are confusing and may hinder accurate clinical decisions with respect to therapeutic services and educational placements for children with WS.This longitudinal case study examined the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense verbs in a child with WS. The development of regular and irregular verbs was monitored using an elicited production task, supplemented with informal language samples and a grammaticality judgment task. The authors found an unusual profile of regular and irregular past tense use that both approximated and diverged from normal expectations at various stages. The unusual pattern of past tense acquisition is presented in its relation to other language problems known with regard to WS. Clinical implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.

The Language of Truthful and Deceptive Denials and Confessions

This study examined differences in language usage as a function of message veracity and speech act type. A quasi-experiment crossed truthful and deceptive messages with confessions and denials in an induced cheating situation. Transcribed messages were analyzed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. Relative to honest participants, liars exhibited fewer negative emotions, less discrepancy, fewer modal verbs, more modifiers, and they spoke longer. Denials, relative to confessions, were characterized by shorter sentences, more negations, greater discrepancy, fewer past tense verbs, and more present tense verbs. The results are inconsistent with previous findings, suggesting a lack of cross-situational diagnostic utility.

Making sense of irregular realisations of the past tense suffix in Northern Sotho: the phonology-morphology interface

Descriptions in Northern Sotho textbooks of past tense formation and the many alternations of the past tense suffix have traditionally been based on the phonological environment to which *-ilê is affixed. Explanations were never offered as to why, within the same phonological environment, the past tense suffix could realise different past tense forms. The realisation of more than one form in similar phonological environments has been interpreted as exceptions. Following on the valuable contribution of Bastin (1983), this article illustrates how, when affixed to similar vowel-consonant phonological environments constituted by simple stem material versus an extension occurring in a stem, the past tense suffix in Northern Sotho reacts differently. This is seen as indicating that simple verb stems and extended verb stems were historically treated differently during past tense formation. Although the boundaries between the two strategies that were followed have become blurred due to analogy and lexicalisation, there is ample language data to support this notion. The research reflected in this article was aimed at building a lexical transducer for the formation of Northern Sotho past tense verbs and serves to augment rather inadequate existing grammatical descriptions of past tense formation.

Morphosyntax in children with word finding difficulties

Children with word finding difficulties (CwWFDs) are slower and less accurate at naming monomorphemic words than typically developing children (Dockrell, Messer & George, 2001), but their difficulty in naming morphologically complex words has not yet been investigated. One aim of this paper was to identify whether CwWFDs are similar to typically developing children at producing inflected (morphologically complex) words. A second aim was to investigate whether the dual-mechanism model could account for the use of morphology in a sample of CwWFDs, exemplifying the notion that regular inflections are part of a rule-based system and computed on-line, while irregular inflections are retrieved directly from the associative system (Pinker, 1999). The inflectional knowledge of a group of CwWFDs was compared against a group of language age-matched typically developing peers in three experiments. In Experiment 1 children produced the past tenses of high- and low-frequency regular and irregular English verbs. In Experiment 2 children generalized their knowledge of the past tense system onto nonsense verbs and in Experiment 3 children produced past tenses of verbs used in either a denominal or a verb root context. In each of these three studies, the CwWFDs performed similarly to matched typical children, suggesting that they do not have a selective problem with morphosyntactic features of words. The findings provide mixed support for the dual-mechanism model.

A statistical learning perspective on children's learning about graphotactic and morphological regularities in spelling.

We put forward our view on how children learn to spell through a review of recent research on English and French children's spelling development. We examine children's learning of graphotactic conventions (legal combinations of letters), followed by a more in-depth treatment of how children learn the place of morphemes (smallest units of meaning in language) in spelling. We contrast findings from recent research with those of traditional models that suggest that children use both graphotactic and morphological information relatively late in their spelling careers and that the end-point of development, particularly for morphological conventions, lies in rule-based performance. Instead, it seems that quite young children's spellings are influenced by both graphotactic and morphological patterns and that writers do not rely (at least exclusively) on rules. We consider the possibility that children might use statistical learning to gain knowledge of both graphotactic and morphological features of the orthography. Keywords: morphology, spelling acquisition, orthographic learning, spelling development The English and French orthographies adhere to several types of regularities: specifically, phonological, graphotactic, and morphological. In this article, we put forward our view on how children's spellings are influenced by these consistencies, with a special focus on learning of graphotactic and morphological regularities. Our approach draws on the statistical learning perspective, in which it is important to consider the regularities in the (written) input on which children could rely. Accordingly, we begin by considering the kind of information represented in the English and French orthographies. French and English, like most alphabetic orthographies, rely in part on the regular connections between letters and sounds to generate word spellings. This is the case for the words cat and non (no). And yet this phonological basis does not explain the variability with which sounds are represented across different words. For example, the /eI/ sound can be spelled with -ay, -ey, -eigh, -a, and -ea at the ends of words in English and with -ez, -ai, -e, -ef, -ee, and -aie at the end of words in French. A second source of information useful to spelling comes from graphotactic regularities about the legal combinations of letters.' In French, words cannot end in a consonant doublet on its own (e.g., pomme, but not *pomm_ for the word apple in French), but they can in English. In English it is extremely unusual for words to start with consonant doublets (e.g., full, but not *fful), and such patterns never occur in French. These graphotactic patterns determine, in part, the specific letters that make up the spellings of words in both English and French. A third level of consistency in spelling comes from the smallest units of meaning in language, or morphemes. The use of morphological information determines the choice between several plausible representations of a given sound. The decision between the many different spellings of/e/ (as in bed, head, and said) is simple for some words when morphology is considered (e.g., ea in health driven by the root heal). Similarly, the sound /et/ has many different spellings in French (e.g., -aite, -ete or -ete), but a word ending in a diminutive suffix is always spelled -ette (as in fillette, little girl). Morphology even sometimes overrides the phonological basis of spelling. English regular past tense verbs end in the letters -ed, despite the pronunciation of these letters as either /t/, /d/ or /Id/ (as in walked, warned, and spotted). Similarly, in French the letters -ai are used for the sound 3 in faiseur (/fazr/, producer) to preserve the spelling of the root (faire /fer/, to do), despite the fact that e is the typical spelling of this sound. In the above examples, morphology could be useful, but success in spelling could also be achieved through word-specific memorization. …

How kids learn to say the darnedest things: the effect of multiple exemplar instruction on the emergence of novel verb usage.

We report experiments using time-lagged pre- and postintervention designs with (a) 4 first graders with learning delays, and (b) a systematic replication with 3 preschoolers with learning delays. Both experiments tested the effects of multiple exemplar instructional procedures (MEI) on the emergence of untaught past tense emission of novel regular verbs (e.g., jumped derived from jump) and grammatically inaccurate but experimentally correct usage of irregular verbs (e.g., singed derived from sing). Prior to the MEI, none of the children could produce regular or irregular past tense forms to pictures that provided simulated contexts (pictures with backgrounds for past and present tense). MEI provided across the picture contexts for past and present tense used separate training sets of verbs to teach children to form regular past tense. After either 1 or 2 MEI training sets, the children emitted accurate past tense forms of the untaught regular and inaccurate, but experimentally correct irregular verbs. These findings provided an instructional history that resulted in the children's acquisition of past tense for untaught regular past tense verbs and "creative" errors with irregular tenses. Results are discussed in terms of the research on experimentally induced sources for novel verbal behavior and related interpretations.

Language Acquisition and Development: Studies of Learners of First and Other Languages

Introduction: Some Similarities and Differences Between L1 and L2 Acquisition and Development - Brian Tomlinson Part I. Critical Reviews of the Literature 1. The Role of Proto-Reading Activities in the Acquisition and Development of Effective Reading Skills - Hitomi Masuhara 2. The Transfer of Reading from the Language of Wider Communication to the First Language - Agatha van Ginkel 3. The Processing of Past Tense Verbs for L1 Learners of English - Natalie Barber 4. The Roles of Audio-Visual Mental Aids in the Development of First and Other Language Proficiency - Brian Tomlinson and Javier Avilla 5. Applications of the Research into the Roles of Audio-Visual Mental Aids for Language Teaching Pedagogy - Brian Tomlinson and Javier Avilla. 6. Internalization and Language Acquisition - James Lantolf and Beatriz Centeno-Cortes 7. Affect in L2 Teacher Talk - Jane Arnold and Carmen Fonseca 8. The Attitudes of Language Learners Towards Target Varieties of the Language - Ivor Timmis Part II. Research Reports 9. The Value of Recasting During Meaning Focused Activities 1 - Brian Tomlinson 10. The Value of Recasting During Meaning Focused Activities 2 - Javier Avilla 11. Output Like Input: Influence of Children's Literature on Young L2 Learners' Written Expression - Irma Kaarina Ghosn 12. The Value of Comprehension in the Early Stages of the Acquisition and Development of Bahasa Indonesia by Native and by Non-Native Speakers - Erlin Susanti Barnard 13. Classroom Reticence in the Learning of Vietnamese and of English in Vietnam - Bao Dat 14. A 'Sort of' Puzzle for Non- Native-Like Fluency - Luke Prodromou 15. Perceptions of Culture By British Students Learning French - Catherine von Knorring 16. A Blind Learner in EFL Mainstream Courses: A Case Study at The Lebanese American University - Nola Bacha Conclusions - Brian Tomlinson.

Priming English past tense verbs: Rules or statistics?

A key question in language processing concerns the rule-like nature of many aspects of grammar. Much research on this topic has focused on English past tense morphology, which comprises a regular, rule-like pattern (e.g., bake-baked) and a set of irregular forms that defy a rule-based description (e.g., take-took). Previous studies have used past tense priming to support the theory that the two forms are processed using different cognitive mechanisms. In the present study we investigated this distinction more closely, focusing specifically on whether the regular/irregular distinction is categorical or graded. Priming for regular and irregular forms was compared, as well as for forms that are irregular but display a partial regularity (suffixed irregular verbs, e.g., sleep-slept). Participants performed a lexical decision task with either a masked visual (Experiment 1) or an auditory prime (Experiment 2). We also manipulated prime-target ISI (0 vs. 500 ms), given previous studies indicating this factor might also influence the magnitude and quality of effects. We observed priming effects for both regular and irregular verbs, however the degree of priming of both was influenced by prime modality and processing time. When the prime was masked and presented for 66 ms regulars and suffixed irregulars patterned together, and were different from vowel change irregular forms. As the processing time increased (using longer ISI or cross-modal presentation), all morphologically related words showed facilitation. The results suggest that priming arises as a convergence of orthographic, phonological and semantic overlap that is especially strong for morphologically related words.

Recast Density and Acquisition of Novel Irregular Past Tense Verbs

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) lag behind children with typical language (TL) in their grammatical development, despite equivalent early exposure to recasts in conversation (M. E. Fey, T. E. Krulik, D. F. Loeb, & K. Proctor-Williams, 1999) and the ability to learn from recasts in intervention as quickly as do children with TL (K. E. Nelson, S. Camarata, J. Welsh, L. Butovsky, & M. Camarata, 1996). This experiment tested whether this apparent paradox could be attributed to variations in the density of recasts in conversation versus intervention. Thirteen children (7-8 years of age) with SLI and 13 language-similar children (5-6 years of age) with TL were exposed to 3 recast densities of novel irregular past tense verbs (none, conversation-like, intervention-like) over 5 sessions. Outcomes were based on spontaneous conversational productions and a post-test probe. As predicted, at conversation-like densities, children with TL more accurately produced the target verbs they heard in recasts than in nonrecast models (d = 0.58), children with SLI showed no differences, and children with TL produced the verbs more accurately than did children with SLI (d = 0.54). Contrary to expectations, at higher intervention-like recast densities, the SLI group did not improve their accuracy, and the TL group performances were significantly poorer (d = 0.47). At conversational levels, recasts facilitated greater verb learning than models alone but only in the TL group. Increasing recast density to the modest levels in this brief intervention experiment did not benefit children with SLI and led to poorer learning for children with TL. To optimize learning, efficiency of recast distribution as well as rate must be considered.

Identifying empty subjects by modality information: the case of the Japanese sentence-final particles -yo and -ne

The present study conducted four experiments to investigate how modality information provided through the sentence-final particles -yo and -ne were utilized in identifying an empty subject by native Japanese speakers. Experiment 1 conducted a whole-sentence anomaly decision task, finding that base sentences without -yo and -ne attached were processed more quickly than sentences with either -yo or -ne and that sentences with -yo were processed more quickly than the same sentences with -ne. A delay in processing sentences with -ne was created by the ambiguity of an empty subject identified by -ne as either ‘I’ or ‘you’. In Experiment 2, the auxiliary verb -ou ‘let us’ was added to the base sentence before -yo and -ne, providing a cue to identify the empty subject as ‘we’. Although the base sentences were processed more quickly than those containing the particles -yo and -ne, no other difference resulted from the attachment of these particles. To eliminate the possibility of orthographic-length effects, Experiment 3 compared base sentences with -ou, -ou-yo, and -ou-ne, finding no difference among them (i.e., no ortho- graphic-length effects). Experiment 4 was conducted to further eliminate the possible involvement of discourse-level computation by utilizing base sentences with overt subjects, past tense verbs, and the auxiliary verb -rasii ‘appear to’. Once subjects of sentences were clearly shown, there was no difference among base sentences and those with either -yo or -ne attached (i.e., no discourse-level computation effects). Thus the present study proved that the modality information inherent in the particles -yo and -ne was used for identifying empty subjects.

The trouble with nouns and verbs in Greek fluent aphasia

In the past verb retrieval problems were associated primarily with agrammatism and noun retrieval difficulties with fluent aphasia. With regards to fluent aphasia, so far in the literature, three distinct patterns of verb/noun dissociations have been described for individuals with fluent anomic aphasia in languages with different underlying forms; better verb retrieval, poorer verb retrieval and equal retrieval difficulties for verbs and nouns. Verbs and nouns in Greek are considered of similar morphological complexity thus it was predicted that anomic aphasic individuals would suffer from a non-dissociated impairment of verbs and nouns. Problems with verbs and/or nouns may arise at any stage in the process of lexical retrieval, i.e. lexical-semantic, lemma, lexeme or articulation. The aim of this research was to investigate verb and noun retrieval using a picture-naming task to explore any possible selective noun and/or verb comprehension or retrieval deficits in Greek individuals with anomic aphasia. The results revealed a significant verb/noun dichotomy with verbs significantly more difficult to retrieve than nouns. These findings lend support for the growing body of evidence showing a specific verb impairment in fluent anomic individuals as well as Broca's patients. Given the prevailing view, that anomic patients experience difficulty retrieving the morpho-phonological form of the target word, the results show that specific information of the grammatical category is also important during word form retrieval. Learner outcomes: The reader will become familiar with (i) studies investigating grammatical word class breakdown in individuals with aphasia who speak different languages, (ii) the application of the serial model to word production breakdown in aphasia and (iii) the characteristics of verbs and nouns in Greek. It will be concluded that successful verb retrieval for fluent aphasic individuals who speak Greek is dependant on the retrieval of the morpho-phonological information of the target verb.

Promoting generalization and maintenance of skills learned via natural language teaching.

Introduction Delays in language acquisition can have serious deleterious effects on the educational and social development of children (Goldstein & Kaczmarek, 1992; Ramey & Campbell, 1992; Warren & Kaiser, 1986). Such delays are considered by some to be a disaster (Warren & Kaiser, 1986). Unfortunately, delayed language acquisition is one of the most prevalent disabilities in early childhood. For example, Wetherby and Prizant (1992) reported that 70% of 3- to 5-year-olds with developmental disabilities have language delays (Wetherby & Prizant, 1992). The influence of various environmental factors on children's language development has been clearly established over the last 20 years (e.g., Bricker, 1993; Hart & Risley, 1992, 1995; Moerk, 1986, 1992; Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994); and children with developmental disabilities are known to be especially vulnerable to these variables (Tannock & Girolametto, 1992). These variables include, for example, the caregiver's responsiveness to child vocalizations, the reciprocity in verbal interaction between caregiver and child, the frequency of verbal interaction, and the availability of stimulating materials (Bradley & Caldwell, 1976; Hart & Risley, 1992; Huttonlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). Of the environmental factors that influence language development, patterns of child-addressed speech have surfaced as particularly important (Hart, 1991; Hemmeter & Kaiser, 1990; Warren & Kaiser, 1988). For this reason, caregivers are considered to have a critical influence on the child and the child's language learning environment (Hemmeter & Kaiser, 1990, p. 335); and patterns of child addressed speech have been observed to either support or limit language learning opportunities (Nelson, 1973). For example, Hart and Risley (1995) reported differences between parents in both the quantity and quality of child-addressed speech. Moreover, they found that the style of parental responsiveness, feedback tone, and guidance was positively correlated with language growth. More specifically, the children of families from higher SES groups heard an average of 2,150 words per hour in comparison to the children families from lower SES group, who heard only 620 words per hour (Hart & Risley, 1995, p. 132). Further, the language addressed to the children in the higher SES group included a richer distribution of particular linguistic features (e.g., nouns, modifiers, past-tense verbs, auxiliary-fronted questions, declarative sentences, and multi-clause sentences) and a more positive pattern of messages (e.g., a higher frequency of positive feedback. fewer imperatives, less negative feedback). As expected, by age three years, the vocabularies of the children who were provided with this richer and more positive language style were two times larger than the vocabularies of the children whose language input was more restricted and less positive. Furthermore, the children's language abilities at age three years were good predictors of later language abilities at nine years (Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994). Various methods of language instruction have been developed over the years to assist children who present with language delays. Some of these methods are characterized as trainer-directed (e.g., discrete trial instruction) and others are considered more naturalistic (Fey, 1986). The latter include incidental teaching (e.g., Hart & Risley, 1975), mand-modeling (e.g., Rogers-Warren & Warren, 1980; Warren, McQuarter, & Rogers-Warren, 1984), and delayed prompt or time-delay (e.g., Halle, Marshall, & Spradlin, 1979). These more naturalistic procedures have been combined into a comprehensive teaching strategy called milieu language teaching (e.g., Kaiser, 1993). Taken as a whole, these procedures will be referred to as naturalistic language teaching (NLT) for the purposes of this paper. …

THE USE OF PRESENT PERFECT IN THE EXPRESSION OF PAST TEMPORALITY IN L2 SPANISH AND CATALAN BY CHILDREN OF MOROCCAN ORIGIN

This study examines the acquisition of Catalan and Spanish past-tense verbs (Preterite, Present Perfect, and Imperfect) by children of Moroccan origin in three schools in the Barcelona metropo1itan area. It presents data that allow us to study which of the three tenses poses the most problems for the second language (L2) speakers as compared to the native speakers in a control group. The data were obtained using elicited story-retell tasks and oral narratives. The results show that in both languages acquiring the accurate functional use of verbs is more difficult than making the right lexical or morphological choices. The greatest functional difficulty lies in the acquisition of the Preterite vis-à-vis the Present Perfect. These results provide additional evidence that form precedes function. However, they challenge an established position on the acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages, which holds that the most difficult functional feature to acquire for L2 learners of these languages is the difference between perfective and imperfective tenses.

Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak

The experimental studies presented in this paper exploit agreement attraction in order to examine the mechanisms underlying the production of subject–verb agreement in Slovak. Our experiments verify that the processes which specify the gender feature on past tense verbs are subject to interference from local nouns, and that the likelihood of interference from the local noun depends on the relative markedness of the subject phrase’s head and local noun gender. The results suggest that, unlike the asymmetries observed with the two-term opposition between singular and plural, the markedness asymmetries observed with the three Slovak genders are not explicable solely in terms of the under-specification (or default status) of the unmarked value. The results also indicate that the likelihood of attraction depends on the case form of the head and local noun. The effects relating to gender markedness and to grammatical case provide evidence that producing subject–verb agreement requires the retrieval of an agreement source from content-addressable working memory.

Consistency and regularity in past-tense verb generation in healthy ageing, Alzheimer's disease, and semantic dementia

Older adults, individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT), and individuals with semantic dementia (SD) produced the past tense of verbs based on present-tense carrier sentences (e.g., Everyday I ding the bell. Yesterday I_____the bell). Both regularity (i.e., whether or not -ed is used for the past tense) and consistency (i.e., the degree to which verbs of similar orthography and phonology in the present tense have similar past tenses to the target) were manipulated. Participants received regular consistent (e.g., land–landed), regular inconsistent (e.g., weed–weeded), irregular consistent (e.g., sting–stung), and irregular inconsistent (e.g., light–lit) verbs. The dependent measures were overall accuracy rates and error rate types (e.g., regularizations, analogies, and other errors). Both consistency and regularity influenced performance. In addition, individuals with DAT showed a disproportionate deficit for inconsistent verbs associated with a high summed frequency of enemies, whereas SD individuals produced disproportionate breakdowns in performance on regular inconsistent, irregular consistent, and irregular inconsistent verbs. These results are consistent with the perspective that semantic/lexical processes are involved in processing the past tense of both irregular verbs and regular inconsistent verbs, and that attention is used to select appropriate responses and control inappropriate responses.

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.

The effects of learning to spell on children’s awareness of morphology

Because the spelling of many words in the English language (and in many other languages as well) depends on their morphemic structure, children have to have some knowledge about morphemes in order to learn to read and write. This raises the possibility that children gain much of their explicit knowledge about morphemes as a direct result of learning to read and to spell. We report two large-scale longitudinal studies that support the idea of this kind of causal connection. In the first study children’s success in spelling the inflexion at the end of regular past verbs predicted their performance in two morphological awareness tasks a year later. In the second study the children’s consistency in spelling morphemes predicted their ability to define new words on the basis of their morphemic structure. We conclude that the experience of learning to read and write does affect people’s knowledge of morphemes, and we argue that the causal relationship between morphemic knowledge and reading and writing is probably a two-way one.

Development of phonological, morphological, and orthographic knowledge in young spellers: The case of inflected verbs

This study was designed to simultaneously investigate the influence of phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness skills on the ability to spell inflected verbs in structured spelling tasks. Children in grades 1, 2, and 3 (n=103) spelled inflected past and progressive tense verbs and completed awareness tasks. Developmental changes occurred in the ability to include the inflected ending, to spell the ending consistently reflecting the correct morphological unit, and to affix the ending using the correct orthographic pattern. The contributions of phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness to spelling development varied across the three grades but were similar for each sub-component, suggesting a developmental relationship between the ability to spell inflected verbs and linguistic and orthographic awareness.

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.