Woollams Anna M, Joanisse Marc, Patterson Karalyn
Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
J Mem Lang. 2009 Jul 1;61(1):55-76. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2009.02.002.
The standard task used to study inflectional processing of verbs involves presentation of the stem form from which the participant is asked to generate the past tense. This task reveals a processing disadvantage for irregular relative to regular English verbs, more pronounced for lower-frequency items. Dual- and single-mechanism theories of inflectional morphology are both able to account for this pattern; but the models diverge in their predictions concerning the magnitude of the regularity effect expected when the task involves past-tense generation from meaning. In this study, we asked normal speakers to generate the past tense from either form (verb stem) or meaning (action picture). The robust regularity effect observed in the standard form condition was no longer reliable when participants were required to generate the past tense from meaning. This outcome would appear problematic for dual-mechanism theories to the extent that they assume the process of inflection requires stem retrieval. By contrast, it supports single-mechanism models that consider stem retrieval to be task-dependent. We present a single-mechanism model of verb inflection incorporating distributed phonological and semantic representations that reproduces this task-dependent pattern.
用于研究动词屈折变化处理的标准任务包括呈现词干形式，要求参与者据此生成过去式。该任务揭示了不规则英语动词相对于规则英语动词在处理上的劣势，低频词的这种劣势更为明显。屈折形态学的双机制和单机制理论都能够解释这种模式；但在任务涉及根据意义生成过去式时，这两种模型对于预期的规则性效应大小的预测存在分歧。在本研究中，我们要求正常说话者从形式（动词词干）或意义（动作图片）生成过去式。当要求参与者根据意义生成过去式时，在标准形式条件下观察到的强烈规则性效应不再可靠。就双机制理论假设屈折过程需要检索词干而言，这一结果对它们来说似乎是个问题。相比之下，它支持将词干检索视为依赖任务的单机制模型。我们提出了一个动词屈折变化的单机制模型，该模型结合了分布式语音和语义表征，再现了这种依赖任务的模式。
