Regular Past Tense Research Articles

They played with the trade: MEG investigation of the processing of past tense verbs and their phonological twins

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.

In search of meaning: Semantic effects on past-tense inflection

Within single-mechanism connectionist models of inflectional morphology, generating the past-tense form of a verb depends upon the interaction of semantic and phonological representations, with semantic information being particularly important for irregular or exception verbs. We assessed this hypothesis in two experiments requiring normal speakers to produce the past tense from a verb stem that takes a regular or exceptional past tense. Experiment 1 revealed significant latency advantages for high- over low-imageability words for both regular verbs (e.g., "lunged" faster than "loved") and exception items (e.g., "drank" faster than "dealt"); but critically, this effect was significantly larger for exceptions than for regulars. Experiment 2 employed a semantic priming paradigm where participants inflected verb stems (e.g., sit) preceded by related (e.g., chair) or unrelated primes (e.g., jug) and revealed a priming effect in accuracy that was confined to the exception items. Our results are consistent with predictions from single-mechanism connectionist models of inflectional morphology and converge with findings from neurological patients and studies of reading aloud.

Effects of Recasts on Child EFL Learners’ Development of Regular and Irregular Past Tense Forms

Recasts have been at the center of much discussion in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and a great deal of research has explored the...

Past Tense Production by English Second Language Learners With and Without Language Impairment

This study investigated whether past tense use could differentiate children with language impairment (LI) from their typically developing (TD) peers when English is children's second language (L2) and whether L2 children's past tense profiles followed the predictions of Bybee's (2007) usage-based network model. A group of L2 children with LI (L2-LI) and a matched group of L2-TD peers were administered the past tense probe from the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 2001) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 1997). A representative input corpus provided distributional information for each verb used. Background information was obtained via parent questionnaire. The L2-LI group used fewer tense-marked verbs than did the L2-TD group. In both groups, vocabulary size and word frequency predicted accuracy with regular and irregular verbs. Children omitted regular past tense marking most often after alveolar stops, dropping the allomorph /Id/; L2-TD children omitted /t/ more often than /d/. Finally, first language typology predicted past tense accuracy. Past tense use could potentially differentiate between English L2 children with and without LI. The impact of vocabulary, frequency, and phonological factors supported the network model and indicated profile differences between L2-LI and L2-TD children.

The storage and composition of inflected forms in adult-learned second language: A study of the influence of length of residence, age of arrival, sex, and other factors

It remains unclear whether adult-learned second language (L2) depends on similar or different neurocognitive mechanisms as those involved in first language (L1). We examined whether English past tense forms are computed similarly or differently by L1 and L2 English speakers, and what factors might affect this: regularity (regular vs. irregular verbs), length of L2 exposure (length of residence), age of L2 acquisition (age of arrival), L2 learners’ native language (Chinese vs. Spanish), and sex (male vs. female). Past tense frequency effects were used to examine the type of computation (composition vs. storage/retrieval). The results suggest that irregular past tenses are always stored. Regular past tenses, however, are either composed or stored, as a function of various factors: both sexes store regulars in L2, but only females in L1; greater lengths of residence lead to less dependence on storage, but only in females; higher adult ages of arrival lead to more reliance on storage. The findings suggest that inflected forms can rely on either the same or different mechanisms in L2 as they do in L1, and that this varies as a function of multiple interacting factors.

Intervention for co-occurring speech and language difficulties: Addressing the relationship between the two domains

Although many children are referred with difficulties in both their speech and their language, the literature offers relatively little guidance on their therapy. Should clinicians treat these difficulties independently? Or should treatment depend on the potential impact of one domain on the other? This study aimed to investigate the relationship between speech and morphosyntax in treatment for a 5-year-old boy, B, with speech and language difficulties. Therapy targeted the production of regular past tenses and plurals. B had the necessary phonology for the former but not the latter. Therapy therefore directly targeted production of the past tense but targeted plurals by treating the production of the necessary phonology. After therapy, B successfully produced regular past tenses for both treated and untreated verbs. Irregular verbs did not improve. Treatment for production of word-final /s/ was successful and generalized to untreated words but not to the production of /s/ in initial or medial positions. Plurals formed by adding /s/ but not those by adding /z/ benefited. Similar treatment for production of word-final /z/ was also successful and appeared to generalize to words with /z/ in initial and medial positions. However, although plurals were now marked, they were usually realized as [dz]. The results of this single-case study demonstrate that intervention for children with speech and language impairments should take account of the aspects of speech and morphology that are impaired, and the ways these may impact on each other.

Rehabilitation of past tense verb production and non-canonical sentence production in left inferior frontal non-fluent aphasia

Background: Studies devoted to improving past tense verb production in Broca's aphasic patients are sparse. Of the existing studies few have produced generalised improvement on untreated verbs, although one study has shown improvement on untreated regular, but not irregular, verbs (Weinrich, Boser, & McCall, 1999). Within a single mechanism account of past tense verb production (McClelland & Patterson, 2002a, 2002b), irregular verbs fall into clusters that share similar transformations from their stem to past tense. No studies to our knowledge have explored whether strengthening irregular verb representations during rehabilitation can support production on untreated irregulars from the same irregular clusters. Aims: The aim of the current paper was to test the single mechanism claim that generalised improvement can be directed via irregular verb clusters in a Broca's aphasic participant (DS). We treated past tense verb production in sentences by using a mapping therapy, with the aim of maximising improved production of past tense verbs at both the single word and sentence level. Methods & Procedures: The study used a thematic mapping procedure requiring DS first to describe what was happening in a picture with two characters twice, beginning with different characters each time. Two thematic questions followed and DS was asked to produce the canonical and non-canonical sentences again. Non-canonical sentences required past tense verb production. Pre- and post-treatment baselines were administered to test gains in sentence production, sentence comprehension, and verb production. Generalised verb production was assessed using three untreated sets: regular verbs, irregular verbs from the same “clusters” as treated items, and irregulars from other verb clusters. Outcomes & Results: Generalised improvements were seen in the production of non-canonical sentences. Regular and irregular past tense verb production also improved, in both single word and sentence production modalities. There was significant generalised improvement to the untreated regular verb set. Interestingly, the improvement on treated irregular verbs generalised only to untreated irregulars from the same clusters as treated verbs. Conclusions: The findings suggest that past tense verb production can be improved by promoting mapping between semantic and syntactic levels of sentence processing. The generalisation to untreated verbs with similar transformations from their stem to their past tense is promising from a clinical standpoint, suggesting that generalisation may be directed in this way. Our findings also demonstrate how rehabilitation studies can contribute to the current theoretical debate between competing models of past tense verb production. Here, the findings support an account positing generalisation across clusters of irregular verbs.

Irregular past tense forms in English: how data from children with specific language impairment contribute to models of morphology

Two cognitive models of inflectional morphology are widely debated in the literature—the Words and Rules model, whereby irregular forms are stored in the lexicon but regular forms are created by rule, and Single Mechanism models, whereby both regulars and irregulars form an associative network, with no rules. A newer model, the Computational Grammatical Complexity (CGC) model, recognises the contribution of hierarchical complexity in three components of the grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, to the construction of morphologically complex forms. This model has previously been tested for regular past tense inflection in English, and in this study we test its predictions for the English irregular past tense, in four groups of children: a group with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI; aged 9;8–17;8), and three groups of typically developing children (aged 5;4–8;5). Children with G-SLI provide an important test case for the CGC model because they have deficits in syntax, morphology and phonology. As predicted, children with G-SLI produced fewer tense-marked irregulars than expected for their age, and fewer over-regularisations than their language-matched controls. The effect of verb-end phonology on over-regularisation and null-marking errors was the same for all groups: both G-SLI and typically developing children were more likely to over-regularise verbs ending in a vowel, and more likely to null-mark verbs ending in an alveolar consonant. We interpret these results as providing further support for the CGC model.

Acquiring novel words and their past tenses: Evidence from lexical effects on phonetic categorisation

Two experiments addressed how novel verbs come to be represented in the auditory input lexicon, and how the inflected forms of such novel words are acquired and recognised. Participants were introduced to new spoken forms as uninflected verbs. These varied in whether they contained a final /d/ (e.g., confald or confal). Either immediately after training or a week later they performed phonetic categorisation on variants of these forms that ended with an ambiguous phoneme on a /d/-/t/ continuum. Lexical influences in categorisation would be demonstrated by a /d/ response bias, consistent with either the learnt uninflected form (e.g., confald) or a regular past tense inflection of the learnt form (e.g., confalled). In Experiment 1, lexical effects on categorisation were present for both word types, immediately and a week after exposure. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings using degraded stimuli. While lexical effects on response choice were present straight away, lexical facilitation of response speed was stronger after a week. These findings provide evidence for an account of verb learning in which rapidly stored word form information can have immediate lexical properties in some respects, such as allowing generalisation of existing knowledge of verb morphology to new words. However, consolidation over time enhances these representations, enabling swift lexical influences on phoneme perception. Implications for theories of the representation of inflectional forms and the time course of lexical processing of novel words are discussed.

The past tense debate: Is phonological complexity the key to the puzzle?

Theorists disagree over whether our language faculty is a single system or a dual one. Those supporting the latter position believe that English regular and irregular past tense verbs reflect this duality, with some proposing that each is processed by a rule mechanism and memorised lexicon respectively. Single system proponents believe instead that all verbs are processed by the same system, differing only in their degree of reliance on phonological and semantic representations. Regular past tense verbs involve greater phonological processing partly because they are phonologically more complex than irregulars. Early neuroimaging studies showing activation differences between the two have been taken as evidence for a dual system. However, it has been proposed recently that greater activation related to regular verb inflection was instead due to the failure to match regular and irregular verbs for phonological complexity (PC). Using a 2×3 ANOVA, the current event-related fMRI study tested this idea directly by manipulating regularity (regular, irregular) and PC (low, mid,and high) in 19 English-speaking monolingual participants. We found a main effect of PC, supporting the idea that phonological complexity cannot be ignored when considering differences between regular and irregular verbs. However we also found a main effect of regularity, demonstrating that differences over and above phonological complexity exist between the two types of verb. Even with phonological complexity matched, several regions including left inferior frontal gyrus and caudate were more activated for regular verb inflection. Temporal lobe regions and left hippocampus were among regions activated relatively more for irregular verb inflection. These latter findings suggest it may be premature to rule out a dual system account.

Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense: a usage-based approach

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age=4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic structures. Both bilingual and monolingual children were less accurate with irregular than regular past tense forms in both languages. Bilingual children, as a group, were less accurate than monolinguals with the English regular and irregular past tense, and with the French irregular past tense, but not with the French regular past tense. However, bilingual children were as accurate as monolinguals with the past tense in their language of greater exposure, except for English irregular verbs. It is argued that these results support the view that children's acquisition rates are sensitive to input factors, but with some qualifications.

English past tense use as a clinical marker in older bilingual children with language impairment

This study compared the use of English past tense in a group of Spanish–English bilingual children with language impairment (BLI) to younger groups of bilinguals with typical and atypical language development reported in an earlier study. Ten children with BLI enrolled in 3rd–6th grade participated. Children supplied 12 regular, 12 irregular, and 12 novel past tense verbs on an elicitation task. The results demonstrated that despite 2.5 years of school exposure, older children with BLI still lagged in the production of regular and novel past tense verbs when compared to the younger typically developing (TD) controls. Although the rates of productive errors on irregular verbs increased, the older students nonetheless failed to achieve rates of over-regularization comparable to the younger TD group. These data extend earlier findings regarding the exceptional challenge of past tense use, particularly with respect to finite verb morphology in certain children with BLI. These challenges, combined with similarities between monolingual and bilingual impairment, are largely compatible with a linguistic deficit account.

Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms.

The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed-bill) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell-fall; taught-teach). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable regular and irregular length preserved facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers' latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.

Inflection in Williams Syndrome

This study presents experimental results from elicited production and judgment tasks examining perfective past-tense forms of Greek in seven individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) in comparison to three age groups of typically-developing children. We found that the WS group relied more on the regular (‘sigmatic’) past tense and less on the irregular (‘non-sigmatic’) one than typically-developing children. While for the sigmatic past tense, individuals with WS achieved the same or even higher scores as the controls, they had lower scores on several measures involving non-sigmatic forms and produced more overgeneralizations of sigmatic forms than the controls. We also found developmental changes in the performance of the WS group that were largely parallel to those seen for unimpaired children. Our conclusion is that apart from difficulties accessing irregular word forms in production, the inflectional system of people with WS is unimpaired.

Differential effects of focused and unfocused written correction on the accurate use of grammatical forms by adult ESL learners

Abstract Building on Sheen’s (2007) study of the effects of written corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English articles, this article investigated whether direct focused CF, direct unfocused CF and writing practice alone produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by adult ESL learners. Using six intact adult ESL intermediate classes totaling 80 students, four groups were formed: Focused Written CF group (FG, n = 22), Unfocused Written CF group (UG, n = 23), Writing Practice Group (WPG, n = 16) and Control Group (CG, n = 19). A series of ANOVAs with post-hoc comparisons indicated that all three experimental groups (FG, UG and WPG) gained in grammatical accuracy over time in all the posttests. This suggested that doing writing tasks is of value by itself. The FG achieved the highest accuracy gain scores for both articles and the other four grammatical structures (i.e., copular ‘be’, regular past tense, irregular past tense and preposition), followed by, in order, the WPG, UG and CG. Overall, these results suggested that unfocused CF is of limited pedagogical value whereas focused CF can contribute to grammatical accuracy in L2 writing.

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.

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.

Clinical implications of the effects of lexical aspect and phonology on children's production of the regular past tense

This study examined the effect of lexical aspect and phonology on regular past-tense production. Data are presented from a group of 31 children, mean age 33 months, with typical language development. A case study of a 50-month-old child with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is also presented. Children imitated sentence pairs that included an endpoint (accomplishments, e.g. she crawled into a box) or did not (activity, e.g. she crawled around in circles). Verbs ended in obstruents (e.g. walk) or nonobstruents (e.g. roll). The regular past tense was produced with the lowest accuracy in activities ending in obstruents (e.g., she walked in circles). Assessment and treatment suggestions for children with SLI are provided.

Acquisition of English Grammatical Morphology by Native Mandarin-Speaking Children and Adolescents: Age-Related Differences

This 5-year longitudinal study investigated the acquisition of 6 English grammatical morphemes (i.e., regular and irregular past tense, 3rd person singular, progressive aspect -ing, copula BE, and auxiliary DO) by 10 native Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents in the United States (arrived in the United States between 5 and 16 years of age). The goals were to chart and compare the acquisition trajectories and levels of mastery across the morphemes, identify when age-related differences emerged and which forms they took. Morphological proficiency was measured by the accuracy of these morphemes in obligatory contexts during spontaneous speech. The morphemes were mastered by different numbers of participants and showed different growth trajectories. Performance variance was partially predicted by age of arrival (AoAr) in the United States, with early arrivals achieving greater proficiency than late arrivals. However, such AoAr effects took several years to occur and only existed for 2 of the 6 morphemes (i.e., 3rd person singular and regular past tense). Growth curve analysis revealed that language environment was a stronger predictor of individual differences than AoAr. Results did not uncover age-related differences in the acquisition of tense versus non-tense-related morphemes, nor in regular versus irregular morphemes, nor in the error types. Findings support an Environmental account for age-related differences in 2nd language (L2) morphological acquisition. Results also indicate that the acquisition of some grammatical morphemes by school-aged immigrants takes several years to complete. As L2 learners exhibit some error types and difficulties similar to monolingual children with specific language impairment, caution needs to be taken when interpreting and using morphological errors as indicators of speech/language learning problems in this population.