Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, , Cambridge CB2 0SZ, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 Dec 9;369(1634):20120402. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0402. Print 2014.
This paper begins with a focus on the task of stem inflection, where participants are given a verb stem and asked to produce the verb's past-tense form, which can produce a neuropsychological double dissociation with respect to regular versus irregular verbs. Two differing theoretical interpretations are outlined: one is based on specifically morphological and separate brain mechanisms for processing regular versus irregular verbs; the other argues that the two sides of the dissociation can arise from one procedure, which is not specifically morphological, and which relies to differing extents on phonological versus semantic information for regular versus irregular verbs. We then present data from a different version of the task, in which patients were given past-tense forms and asked to produce the present-tense or stem forms (talked → talk and ate → eat). This change yielded a very different pattern of performance in four non-fluent aphasic patients as a function of the regular-irregular manipulation, an outcome which is argued to be more compatible with the single- than the dual-mechanism account. Finally, we present a small amount of data from a task in which the patient was asked to judge whether spoken regular and irregular verb stems and past-tense forms indicated actions occurring today or yesterday. This task produced an even more different and intriguing pattern of performance suggesting a deficit in morpho-syntactic knowledge: not how to produce past-tense forms but what such forms mean and how that understanding interacts with verb regularity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the research field of acquired disorders of tense processing might advance as a result of new approaches, in particular those informed by studies of developmental disorders.
本文首先关注词干屈折的任务，参与者会被提供一个动词词干，并要求生成动词的过去式形式，这可以在规则动词和不规则动词方面产生神经心理学的双重分离。概述了两种不同的理论解释：一种基于处理规则动词和不规则动词的特定形态和独立的大脑机制；另一种则认为，这种分离的两个方面可以来自一个不是特定形态的过程，这个过程在很大程度上依赖于规则动词和不规则动词的语音信息和语义信息。然后，我们呈现了来自任务的另一个版本的数据，在这个版本中，患者被提供过去式形式，并要求生成现在式或词干形式（talked→talk 和 ate→eat）。这种变化导致了四个非流利性失语症患者的表现模式发生了非常不同的变化，这与单一机制而非双重机制解释更一致。最后，我们呈现了一小部分来自一个任务的数据，患者被要求判断口语中规则动词和不规则动词词干以及过去式形式是否表示今天或昨天发生的动作。这个任务产生了更不同和有趣的表现模式，表明存在形态句法知识的缺陷：不是如何生成过去式形式，而是这些形式的含义以及这种理解如何与动词的规则性相互作用。本文最后讨论了获得性时态处理障碍研究领域如何通过新的方法，特别是那些受发展障碍研究启发的方法，取得进展。
