Past Tense Debate

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As Past Tense debate is an existing since the 1980s academic debate between different psycholinguistic theories and model building with regard to the processing of Präteritumsformen ( Past ) of the English language called.

The English language has to label the simple past orthographically the suffix -ed, phonological the suffix [d], which are attached to the trunk of the English verb. So z. B. from play + ed the past tense played. This form is productive in English and is sometimes used incorrectly in children (e.g. holded or breaked) ( Pinker , 1991). One problem with this is that there are around 180 irregular verbs in the English language, which make up around 5% of English verbs and 14% of the 1000 most frequently used verbs in English. These cannot be converted into the past tense with the regular rule.

Various theories exist to explain the mental processing of English verbs.

The rule-based approach (Ullman, 2004; Clahsen, 1999; Sonnenstuhl, Eisenbeiss, & Clahsen, 1999; Pinker , 1991, 1998; Marcus et al., 1995) The rule-based or compositional approach assumes that the process the speech reception words are broken down into morphemic constituents. In speech production, these morphemes are put together to form words. Here grammatical rules are used to combine individual morphemes into words. To explain the processing of irregular verbs, the thesis is put forward that the irregular forms are stored as full forms in an associative network. Associative is understood here to be a direct connection between the basic form and the irregular form, which is activated during processing and thus forms the past tense. Regular verbs, on the other hand, are processed compositionally by adding the past marker to the stem of the verb. For this reason, this approach is also referred to as dual mechanism theory.

Connectionist models ( McClelland & Patterson, 2002; Plaut & Gonnerman, 2000; Joanisse & Seidenberg, 1999; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) seek a different explanation for the problem of irregular verbs. After this, morphology is processed statistically by systematically recognizing and applying similarities between shapes. The same processing mechanism is used for regular and irregular verbs. Differences in processing are due to the different overlap (phonological, orthographical or semantic) between the individual forms. So show z. B. the forms buy and bought and sing and sang different sized phonological and orthographic deviations, whereas the forms play and played are identical in stem

literature

  • Clahsen, H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: A multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 991-1062.
  • Joanisse, MF, & Seidenberg, MS (1999). Impairments in verb morphology after brain injury: A connectionist model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 96, 7592-7597.
  • Marcus, GF, Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189-256.
  • McClelland, JL, & Patterson, K. (2002). “Words or rules” cannot exploit the regularity in exceptions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 464-465.
  • Plaut, DC, & Gonnerman, LM (2000). Are non-semantic morphological effectsincompatible with a distributed connectionist approach to lexical processing? Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 445-485.
  • Pinker, S. (1991). Rules of language. Science, 253, 530-535.
  • Pinker, S. (1998). Words and rules. Lingua, 106, 219-242.
  • Rumelhart, DE, & McClelland, JL (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In D. Rumelhart & JL McClelland (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Sonnenstuhl, I., Eisenbeiss, S., & Clahsen, H. (1999). Morphological priming in the German mental lexicon. Cognition, 72, 203-236.
  • Ullman, MT (2004). Contribution of memory circuits to language: The declarative / procedural model. Cognition, 92, 231-270.