ERIC Number: EJ731311
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004-Jan
Pages: 14
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0749-596X
EISSN: N/A
Phonological Priming and Irregular Past
Stemberger, Joseph Paul
Journal of Memory and Language, v50 n1 p82-95 Jan 2004
It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a sentence-production task, the vowel of the base form or past-tense form of an irregular verb is primed by an identical vowel in the subject noun (e.g., base vowel "cream," past-tense vowel "chrome," unrelated vowel slot). For verbs with different vowels in the base form and past-tense form, phonological priming of the base vowel or of the past-tense vowel increases the rate of overregularization errors such as "*freezed" as compared to an unrelated vowel prime. For verbs with the same vowel in the base and past-tense forms (e.g., "hit/hit"), phonological priming has no effect on the rate of overregularization errors. It is argued that irregular forms are not produced in a specialized subnetwork for (irregular) past-tense forms, but are produced in the general lexical system simultaneous with general phonological processing. Implications for theories of inflectional morphology are discussed.
Descriptors: Phonology, Language Processing, Morphemes, Sentences, Vowels, Verbs, Linguistic Theory, Morphology (Languages), Grammar
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A