MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences UnitCBSU bibliography search
To request a reprint of a CBSU publication, please
click here to send us an email (reprints may not be available for all publications)
Regularity and irregularity in French inflectional morphology
Authors:
MEUNIER, F. & Marslen-Wilson, W.D.
Reference:
Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Conference of the Cogntive Science Society, 346-351, Mahwa, New Jersey: Lawrence Erblaum Associates
Year of publication:
2000
CBU number:
4177
Abstract:
Can regular and irregular verb forms be accommodated by a single representational mechanism or is a dual mechanism ac-count required? In a first experiment (see 5021), we used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to investigate the mental representation of regular and irregular verb forms in French. Using the same linguistic material we ran a second experiment using a masked priming paradigm. Four types of French verbs were contrasted, varying in the phonological and morphological regularity of their verb form inflection. Morphologically related primes, whether regular or irregular, significantly facilitated lexical decision responses for all verb classes. These results contrasted with those observed in English. We argue that the pattern observed in French reflects the decomposability of French irregular forms.
