Authors:

Meunier, F., & MARSLEN-WILSON, W.D.

Reference:

Year of publication:

2004

CBU number:

5443

Abstract:

Can regular and irregular verb forms be accommodated by a single representational mechanism or is a dual mechanism account required? In a first experiment, we used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to investigate the mental representation of regular and irregular verb forms in French. Participants heard a spoken prime (such as aimons, ‘we love’) immediately followed by lexical decision to a visual probe (such as aimer, ‘to love). We contrasted four types of French verbs, varying in the phonological and morphological regularity of their verb form inflection. These were (i) regular verbs (aimons/aimer, ‘we love/to love’) (ii) verbs to which sub-rules apply (teignent/teindre, ‘to dye/they dye’) and (iv) irregular verbs with idiosyncratic alternations (vont/aller, ‘they go/to go’). The infinitive forms of these verbs were presented as targets in three prime conditions, preceded either by a regular form, and irregular/modified form (except for the regular verbs), or a control unrelated prime. Morphologically related primes, whether regular or irregular, significantly facilitated lexical decision responses for all four verb classes. The same pattern of results was observed in a second experiment using a masked priming paradigm. These results contrasted with English, where regularly inflected verbs prime their stems but irregular verbs do not. We argue that this reflects cross-linguistic differences in the morpho-phonological decomposability of French irregular forms, and that the current results enable us to deconfound regularity/irregularity distinctions from language-specific phonological differences.