Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pinker, Steven
• Ullman, Michael T.

Titel

The past and future of the past tense

Ist Teil von

• Trends in cognitive sciences, 2002-11, Vol.6 (11), p.456-463

Ort / Verlag

London: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas regular forms can be computed by a concatenation rule, which requires the procedural system. Irregulars have the psychological, linguistic and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars often have the signatures of grammatical processing. Furthermore, because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it whenever memory fails. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas regular inflection is rule-driven and based in grammatical processing. This dual-mechanism approach differs from single-system connectionist approaches, which fail to capture all the data.