Neuropsychological dissociations between regular and irregular English past-tense morphology have been reported using a lexical decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets. We present N400 event-related potential data from healthy participants using the same design. Both regular and irregular past-tense forms primed corresponding present-tense forms, but with a longer duration for irregular verbs. Phonological control conditions suggested that differences in formal overlap between prime and target contribute to, but do not account (...) for, this difference, suggesting a link between irregular morphology and semantics. Further analysis dividing the irregular verbs into two categories (weak irregular and strong) revealed that priming for strong verbs was reliably stronger than that for weak irregular and regular verbs, which were statistically indistinguishable from one another. We argue that, although we observe a regular-irregular dissociation, the nature of this dissociation is more consistent with single- than with dual-system models of inflectional morphology. (shrink)

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from 16 healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately preceded present-tense targets. To minimize intra-modal phonological priming effects, cross-modal presentation between auditory primes and visual targets was employed, and results were compared to a (...) companion intra-modal auditory study (Justus, T., Larsen, J., de Mornay Davies, P., Swick, D. (2008). Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: evidence from event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 178–194.). For both regular and irregular verbs, faster response times and reduced N400 components were observed for present-tense forms when primed by the corresponding past-tense forms. Although behavioral facilitation was observed with a pseudopast phonological control condition, neither this condition nor an orthographic-phonological control produced significant N400 priming effects. Instead, these two types of priming were associated with a post-lexical anterior negativity (PLAN). Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-system theories of inflectional morphology, as well as intra- and cross-modal prelexical priming. (shrink)

It has been suggested that damage to anterior regions of the left hemisphere results in a dissociation in the perception and lexical activation of past-tense forms. Specifically, in a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets, such patients demonstrate significant priming for irregular verbs (spoke–speak), but, unlike control participants, fail to do so for regular verbs (looked–look). Here, this behavioral dissociation was first confirmed in a group of eleven patients with damage to the (...) pars opercularis (BA 44) and pars triangularis (BA 45) of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e., Broca's area). Two conditions containing word-onset orthographic–phonological overlap (bead–bee, barge–bar) demonstrated that the disrupted regular-verb priming was accompanied by, and covaried with, disrupted ortho-phonological priming, regardless of whether prime stimuli contained the regular inflectional rhyme pattern. Further, the dissociation between impaired regular-verb and preserved irregular-verb priming was shown to be continuous rather than categorical; priming for weak-irregular verbs (spent–spend) was intermediate in size between that of regular verbs and strong verbs. Such continuous dissociations grounded in ortho-phonological relationships between present- and past-tense forms are predicted by single-system, connectionist approaches to inflectional morphology and not predicted by current dual-system, rule-based models. Event-related potential data demonstrated that N400 priming effects were intact for both regular and irregular verbs, suggesting that the absence of significant regular-verb priming in the response time data did not result from a disruption of lexical access, and may have stemmed instead from post-lexical events such as covert articulation, segmentation strategies, and/or cognitive control. (shrink)

Clahsen's theory raises problems that make it seem untenable. As an alternative, a constructivist neural network model is reported that develops a modular architecture and in which a single associative mechanism produces all inflections, displaying an emergent dissociation between regular and irregular verbs. Thus, Clahsen's rejection of associative models of inflection concerns only a subgroup of these models.

This article addresses the question of whether we should conceive of mechanisms as productive of change in a regular way. I argue that, if mechanisms are characterized as fully regular, on the one hand, then not enough processes will count as mechanisms for them to be interesting or useful. If no appeal to regularity is made at all in their characterization, on the other hand, then mechanisms can no longer be useful for grounding prediction and supporting intervention strategies. (...) I conclude that, if the New Mechanistic Philosophy is to be successful, a stochastic characterization of mechanisms must be adopted. (shrink)

Regularly inflected forms often behave differently in language production than irregular forms. These differences are often used to argue that irregular forms are listed in the lexicon but regular forms are produced by rule. Using an experimental speech production task with adults, it is shown that overtensing errors, where a tensed verb is used in place of an infinitive, predominantly involve irregular forms, but that the differences may be due to phonological confounds, not to regularity per (...) se. Errors involve vowel‐changing irregular forms more than suffixing inflected forms, with at best a small difference between regular ‐ed and irregular ‐en. Frequency effects on overtensing errors require a model in which the past‐tense and base forms of the verb are in competition and in which activation functions are nonlinear, and rule out models with specialized subnetworks for past‐tense forms. Implications for theories of language production are discussed. (shrink)

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base’s phonology, whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it. The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be (...) distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that don’t resemble existing nouns, and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names, they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns, replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as “regular” or “irregular”; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.. (shrink)

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal “add -ed” rule that does not require analogy across regular past-tense forms. Children saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a (...) novel verb. Past-tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal “did yesterday.” Collapsing across age group, the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past-tense form was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single-route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past-tense is best explained by a single-route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules. (shrink)

Dual-mechanism models of language maintain a distinction between a lexicon and a computational system of linguistic rules. In his target article, Clahsen provides support for such a distinction, presenting evidence from German inflections. He argues for a structured lexicon, going beyond the strict lexicon versus rules dichotomy. We agree with the author in assuming a dual mechanism; however, we argue that a next step must be taken, going beyond the notion of the computational system as specific rules applying to a (...) linguistic domain. By assuming a richer lexicon, the computational system can be conceived as a more general binding process that applies to different linguistic levels: syntax, morphology, reading, and spelling. (shrink)

Supporters of eliminative connectionism have argued for a pattern association-based explanation of language learning and language processing. They deny that explicit rules and symbolic representations play any role in language processing and cognition in general. Their argument is based to a large extent on two artificial neural network (ANN) models that are claimed to be able to learn the past tenses of English verbs (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, Parallel distributed processing, Vol. 2, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; MacWhinney & Leinbach, (...) 1991, Cognition, 40, 121-157). In this article we critically review Rumelhart and McClelland's as well as MacWhinney and Leinbach's ANN models and conclude that they do not succeed in the assigned task of learning the past tenses of English verbs. In order to answer their challenge to the symbolic processing approach, we present our symbolic pattern associator (SPA)-a general-purpose pattern associator that can learn to associate arbitrary discrete patterns. We carried out several experiments with the SPA using the same set of verbs that was used in MacWhinney and Leinbach's simulation with more realistic training and testing procedures. The SPA outperformed the connectionist models by a wide margin in the accuracy of learning, and successful inductive generalizations to unseen verbs. Our SPA has very natural and psychologically realistic explanations to many psychological effects such as U-shaped learning curve, and is much closer to human subjects in predicting past tense of the pseudo-verbs. In contrast to ANNs, whose internal representations are entirely opaque, the SPA can represent the acquired knowledge in the form of production rules that allow for further higher-level processing and integration, resulting in linguistically realistic associative templates for irregular verbs and production rules for regular verbs. In the light of these findings, we conclude that eliminative connectionists' vision of cognition as simple pattern association and pattern recognition without symbolic representation is inadequate. Pattern association as such does not imply rule-less or cue-based models of language acquisition or of human learning in general. (shrink)

The vast expressive power of language is made possible by two principles: the arbitrary soundmeaning pairing underlying words, and the discrete combinatorial system underlying grammar. These principles implicate distinct cognitive mechanisms: associative memory and symbolmanipulating rules. The distinction may be seen in the difference between regular inflection (e.g., walk-walked), which is productive and open-ended and hence implicates a rule, and irregular inflection (e.g., come-came, which is idiosyncratic and closed and hence implicates individually memorized words. Nonetheless, two very different (...) theories have attempted to collapse the distinction; generative phonology invokes minor rules to generate irregular as well as regular forms, and connectionism invokes a pattern associator memory to store and retrieve regular as well as irregular forms. I present evidence from three disciplines that supports the traditional word/rule distinction, though with an enriched conception of lexical memory with some of the properties of a pattern-associator. Rules, nonetheless, are distinct from patternassociation, because a rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs or their sound patterns, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access fails. I present a dozen such circumstances, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words, in which people inflect the words regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, low-lifes, and Walkmans). A comparison of English to other languages shows that contrary to the connectionist account, default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory, but to a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation. (shrink)

Müller's goal of bringing neuroscience to bear on controversies in linguistics is laudable. However, some of his specific proposals about innateness and autonomy are misguided. Recent studies on the neurobiology of regular and irregular inflectional morphology indicate that these two linguistic processes are subserved by anatomically and physiologically distinct neural subsystems, whose functional organization is likely to be under direct genetic control rather than assembled by strictly epigenetic factors.

The acquisition of English noun and verb morphology is modeled using a single-system connectionist network. The network is trained to produce the plurals and past tense forms of a large corpus of monosyllabic English nouns and verbs. The developmental trajectory of network performance is analyzed in detail and is shown to mimic a number of important features of the acquisition of English noun and verb morphology in young children. These include an initial error-free period of performance on both nouns (...) and verbs followed by a period of intermittent over-regularization of irregular nouns and verbs. Errors in the model show evidence of phonological conditioning and frequency effects. Furthermore, the network demonstrates a strong tendency to regularize denominal verbs and deverbal nouns and masters the principles of voicing assimilation. Despite their incorporation into a single-system network, nouns and verbs exhibit some important differences in their profiles of acquisition. Most importantly, noun inflections are acquired earlier than verb inflections. The simulations generate several empirical predictions that can be used to evaluate further the suitability of this type of cognitive architecture in the domain of inflectional morphology. (shrink)

The irregulars are defiantly quirky. Thousands of verbs monotonously take the -ed suffix for their past tense forms, but ring mutates to rang, not ringed, catch becomes caught, hit doesn't do anything, and go is replaced by an entirely different word, went (a usurping of the old past tense of to wend, which itself once followed the pattern we see in send-sent and bend-bent). No wonder irregular verbs are banned in "rationally designed" languages like Esperanto and Orwell's (...) Newspeak -- and why recently a woman in search of a nonconformist soul-mate wrote a personal ad that began, "Are you an irregular verb?". (shrink)

When referring to the organization of the mental lexicon, the distinction between combinatorial rules and lexical listing for regularly versus irregularly inflected words should be further developed to account for subregular morphological processes. Moreover, the distinction may be more or less appropriate depending on the lexical component under consideration, and it is subject to interplay with other factors that are relevant in determining the representational structure of the lexical system.

Regularities in natural language systems, despite their cognitive advantages in terms of storage and learnability, often coexist with exceptions, raising the question of whether and why irregularities survive. We offer a complex system perspective on this issue, focusing on the irregular past tense forms in English. Two separate processes affect the overall regularity: new verbs constantly entering the vocabulary in the regular form at low frequency, and transitions in both directions occurring in a narrow frequency range. The (...) introduction of new verbs leads to an increase in regular types, that, entering at low frequencies, have a small impact on the perceived irregularity in terms of tokens. The frequency of usage acts as a control parameter, the majority of verbs types being fully-regular at low frequencies, with no evidence of irregularity facing extinction. Very few verbs types in an intermediate frequency region exhibit both regular and irregular forms at the same time, suggesting that the coexistence is unstable. The observed pattern of usage showing an abrupt change in response to small variations of the control parameter only appears in agent-based models provided that the word state is non-binary. By introducing this key ingredient, high-frequency irregular past-tense can survive the tendency to regularize over time, as observed in natural languages. (shrink)

The acquisition of English noun and verb morphology is modeled using a single-system connectionist network. The network is trained to produce the plurals and past tense forms of a large corpus of monosyllabic English nouns and verbs. The developmental trajectory of network performance is analyzed in detail and is shown to mimic a number of important features of the acquisition of English noun and verb morphology in young children. These include an initial error-free period of performance on both nouns (...) and verbs followed by a period of intermittent over-regularization of irregular nouns and verbs. Errors in the model show evidence of phonological conditioning and frequency effects. Furthermore, the network demonstrates a strong tendency to regularize denominal verbs and deverbal nouns and masters the principles of voicing assimilation. Despite their incorporation into a single-system network, nouns and verbs exhibit some important differences in their profiles of acquisition. Most importantly, noun inflections are acquired earlier than verb inflections. The simulations generate several empirical predictions that can be used to evaluate further the suitability of this type of cognitive architecture in the domain of inflectional morphology. (shrink)

The longstanding issue in morphological theory has been the status of inflected forms in the memory. In general, the irregular forms of words are assumed to be learned, stored, and retrieved for use. While the contention on the storage of irregular forms seemed to be clear and cohesive, the views on the nature of storage of regular words vary. For some, all inflected forms are stored while some contend that storage is not homogenous, wherein the frequently-used forms (...) are stored and retrieved for use while the rarer forms are more likely to be assembled by analogy to stored forms or by rule. This chapter investigates inflectional gaps or defectiveness in languages exhibiting extensive inflection. Such languages are rich sources of inflection by rule. In what follows is an extensive investigation of the defectiveness in two unrelated polysynthetic languages with extensive but regular inflectional paradigms. The first language examined is the Central Alaskan Yup'ik which is an Eskimo-Aleut language of the southwestern Alaska. The second language evaluated is the Mohawk, an Iroquoian language of the northeastern North America. The patterns of defectiveness of both languages provide insight into the patterns of storage of some regular inflected forms and the effect of the frequency of occurrence of some regular forms of words on the storage patterns. (shrink)

Hogue's Irregular Verbs of Attic Prose - The Irregular Verbs of Attic Prose, their forms, prominent meanings, and important compounds; together with lists of related words and English derivatives. By Addison Hogue, Professor of Greek in the University of Mississippi. Ginn and Co., 1889. 6s. - Volume 4 Issue 4.

Summary The paper deals with selected problems of the verbalization of the concepts “place”, “space” and “direction”, with a special consideration of their successive development in language and in language acquisition. The theoretical background are assumptions concerning the genesis of the concept of place and movement. Some of them claim that movement and direction precede the conceptualization of place and space. However, numerous linguistic phenomena seem to prove the opposite hypothesis, namely that the concept of place and, thus, its verbalization (...) by means of stative verbs, local adverbs and prepositional phrases is original, whereas the concepts of movement, especially of controlled, caused movement denoted by transitive, regular verbs is derived from the concept of locum encoded by irregular verbs. (shrink)

The speech-to-song illusion ( Deutsch et al., 2011 ) tracks the perceptual transformation from speech to song across repetitions of a brief spoken utterance. Because it involves no change in the stimulus itself, but a dramatic change in its perceived affiliation to speech or to music, it presents a unique opportunity to comparatively investigate the processing of language and music. In this study, native English-speaking participants were presented with brief spoken utterances that were subsequently repeated ten times. The utterances were (...) drawn either from languages that are relatively difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce, or languages that are relatively easy for a native English speaker to pronounce. Moreover, the repetition could occur at regular or irregular temporal intervals. Participants rated the utterances before and after the repetitions on a 5-point Likert-like scale ranging from “sounds exactly like speech” to “sounds exactly like singing.” The difference in ratings before and after was taken as a measure of the strength of the speech-to-song illusion in each case. The speech-to-song illusion occurred regardless of whether the repetitions were spaced at regular temporal intervals or not; however, it occurred more readily if the utterance was spoken in a language difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce. Speech circuitry seemed more liable to capture native and easy-to-pronounce languages, and more reluctant to relinquish them to perceived song across repetitions. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in organizational trends to hire irregular workers. This inclination, in a time of great flux and uncertainty, exacerbates human resource issues faced by firms. We argue that corporate social responsibility can be an important antecedent to improve the workplace attitudes of irregular workers and as a result reduce the negative impact on organizations of the increased use of an irregular workforce. Hence, we explore the relationship between perceived CSR (...) and unfairness perception and social relations of subcontracted workers with regular workers. We further attempt to explain these relationships through the mediating effects of psychological contract violation and organizational identity, respectively. Our analysis supports a negative effect of composite and external CSR on unfairness perception and positive effect on social relations. Additionally, our results support partial mediating roles of psychological contract violation and organizational identity. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are also discussed. (shrink)

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or "metalinguistic") negations. A total of ten distinct negatives-several previously unclassified-are analyzed. The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root. All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional. The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures. The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous. Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms (...) as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional. Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional. The final chapter analyzes other "free form" idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports. (shrink)

Viebahn (2018) has recently argued that several tests for ambiguity, such as the conjunction-reduction test, are not reliable as tests for polysemy, but only as tests for homonymy. I look at the more fine-grained distinction between regular and irregular polysemy and I argue for a more nuanced conclusion: the tests under discussion provide systematic evidence for homonymy and irregular polysemy but need to be used with more care to test for regular polysemy. I put this conclusion (...) at work in the context of the debate over the alleged referential-attributive ambiguity of the definite article. In reply to various criticisms, defenders of the ambiguity view argue that this is a case of polysemy. But opponents object that the dual use of the definite article fails tests for ambiguity. The debate seems to have come to stalemate, unless the relevance of the tests is determined for cases of alleged polysemy. I conclude that the balance of considerations incline towards rejecting the ambiguity thesis. (shrink)

Analogy plays an important role in the production of irregular forms but the proposed Minimalist Morphology (MM) representations do not express this. Recent results also show that the regular forms of strong paradigms can have idiosyncratic properties that cannot be accounted for by MM. Methodological problems with an experiment are discussed and a plea for a processing explanation is made.

Both language and genes evolve by transmission over generations with opportunity for differential replication of forms. The understanding that gene frequencies change at random by genetic drift, even in the absence of natural selection, was a seminal advance in evolutionary biology. Stochastic drift must also occur in language as a result of randomness in how linguistic forms are copied between speakers. Here we quantify the strength of selection relative to stochastic drift in language evolution. We use time series derived from (...) large corpora of annotated texts dating from the 12th to 21st centuries to analyse three well-known grammatical changes in English: the regularization of past-tense verbs, the introduction of the periphrastic ’do’, and variation in verbal negation. We reject stochastic drift in favour of selection in some cases but not in others. In particular, we infer selection towards the irregular forms of some past-tense verbs, which is likely driven by changing frequencies of rhyming patterns over time. We show that stochastic drift is stronger for rare words, which may explain why rare forms are more prone to replacement than common ones. This work provides a method for testing selective theories of language change against a null model and reveals an underappreciated role for stochasticity in language evolution. (shrink)

Are morphological patterns learned in the form of rules? Some models deny this, attributing all morphology to analogical mechanisms. The dual mechanism model (Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1998). On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition, 28, 73-193) posits that speakers do internalize rules, but that these rules are few and cover only regular processes; the remaining patterns are attributed to analogy. This article advocates a third approach, which uses multiple stochastic (...) rules and no analogy. We propose a model that employs inductive learning to discover multiple rules, and assigns them confidence scores based on their performance in the lexicon. Our model is supported over the two alternatives by new "wug test" data on English past tenses, which show that participant ratings of novel pasts depend on the phonological shape of the stem, both for irregulars and, surprisingly, also for regulars. The latter observation cannot be explained under the dual mechanism approach, which derives all regulars with a single rule. To evaluate the alternative hypothesis that all morphology is analogical, we implemented a purely analogical model, which evaluates novel pasts based solely on their similarity to existing verbs. Tested against experimental data, this analogical model also failed in key respects: it could not locate patterns that require abstract structural characterizations, and it favored implausible responses based on single, highly similar exemplars. We conclude that speakers extend morphological patterns based on abstract structural properties, of a kind appropriately described with rules. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 187-197.

Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three main issues are discussed: (a) the key differences between regular and irregular cases and the role, if any, of a “core meaning”; (b) the distinction (...) between pragmatic polysemy and semantic polysemy; and (c) the role of syntactic meaning in both generating and constraining polysemy. (shrink)

Examples from the sciences showing that mechanisms do not always succeed in producing the phenomena for which they are responsible have led some authors to conclude that the regularity requirement can be eliminated from characterizations of mechanisms. In this article, I challenge this conclusion and argue that a minimal form of regularity is inextricably embedded in examples of elucidated mechanisms that have been shown to be causally responsible for phenomena. Examples of mechanistic explanations from the sciences involve mechanisms that have (...) been shown to produce phenomena with a reproducible rate of success. By contrast, if phenomena are infrequent to the point that they amount to irreproducible observations and experimental results, they are indistinguishable from the background noise of accidental happenings. The inability to detect or measure the phenomenon of interest against the background noise of accidental correlations makes it impossible to elucidate a mechanism by experimental means, to demonstrate that a proposed mechanism actually produces the phenomenon, and ultimately to justify why a hypothetical scenario involving an irregular mechanism should be preferred over attributing irreproducible happenings to chance. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a mathematical basis for the plausible idea that regular dynamical laws can only produce (quickly and reliably) regular structures. Thus the actual laws, which are regular, can only produce regular objects, like crystals, and not irregular ones, like living organisms.

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb-structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position, and verb overlap.structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the same between (...) prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross-linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages. (shrink)

Clahsen shows that “combinatorial” inflection is processed differently from “irregular” inflection. However, combinatorially regular affixes need not coincide with “class-default” affixes, that is, affixes shared by more than one inflection class and all of whose rivals are peculiar to one class. This creates a tension that may help to explain the persistence of inflection class systems.

Residence of unauthorized immigrants is a stable feature of the Global North’s liberal democracies. This article asks how liberal-democratic policymakers should respond to this phenomenon, assuming both that states have incontrovertible rights and interests to assert control over immigration and that unauthorized residence is nevertheless an entrenched fact. It argues that a set of liberal-democratic commitments gives policymakers strong reason to implement both so-called ‘firewall’ and ‘regularization’ policies, thereby protecting unauthorized immigrants’ basic needs and interests and officially incorporating many of (...) them in society. It then explains that the background imperative of immigration control creates a dilemmatic tension between these policies, as regularization is envisaged alongside the removal of the ineligible, which is in turn hindered by the implementation of firewalls. This creates a dilemma between the pursuit of two policy goals that are both underwritten by the same value commitments. Though it cannot be entirely dissolved, I argue that the best way to mitigate this dilemma is to design regularization policy in a way that leaves only a small number of unauthorized immigrants subject to removal. (shrink)

��This paper investigates how an evolutionary al- gorithm with an indirect encoding exploits the property of phenotypic regularity, an important design principle found in natural organisms and engineered designs. We present the first comprehensive study showing that such phenotypic regularity enables an indirect encoding to outperform direct encoding con- trols as problem regularity increases. Such an ability to produce regular solutions that can exploit the regularity of problems is an important prerequisite if evolutionary algorithms are to scale to high-dimensional (...) real-world problems, which typically contain many regularities, both known and unrecognized. The indirect encoding in this case study is HyperNEAT, which evolves artificial neural networks (ANNs) in a manner inspired by concepts from biological development. We demonstrate that, in contrast to two direct encoding controls, HyperNEAT produces both regular behaviors and regular ANNs, which enables HyperNEAT to significantly outperform the direct encodings as regularity increases in three problem domains. We also show that the types of regularities HyperNEAT produces can be biased, allowing domain knowledge and preferences to be injected into the search. Finally, we examine the downside of a bias toward regularity. Even when a solution is mainly regular, some irregularity may be needed to perfect its functionality. This insight is illustrated by a new algorithm called HybrID that hybridizes indirect and direct encodings, which matched HyperNEAT’s performance on regular problems yet outperformed it on problems with some irregularity. HybrID’s ability to improve upon the performance of HyperNEAT raises the question of whether indirect encodings may ultimately excel not as stand-alone algorithms, but by being hybridized with a further process of refinement, wherein the indirect encoding produces patterns that exploit problem regu-. (shrink)

The productive use of English past tense morphology in school-aged children (N= 74; 3 years, 8 months to 13 years, 5 months) is explored using on elicited production task. Errors represented 20% of the responses overall. Virtually all of the children demonstrated productivity with regular (e.g., good) and irregular patterns (zero-marking, e.g., sit + sit; vowel-change, e.g., ride -+ rid). Overall frequency of errors decreased with age, yet the tendency for certain types of irregularizations increased in the older (...) groups. Analyses across items indicated that all error types were predicted by combinations of item frequency, phonological chamcteristics of stems and past tense forms, and aspects of phonological past tense “neighborhoods.” Contrary to “hybrid” or dual-mechanism models incorporating a phonologically-insensitive default mechanism (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993), these results suggest that children’s productivity with regular and irregular patterns is consistent with a phonologically-based constraint satisfaction system similar to that implemented in connectionist models (Daugherty & Seidenberg, 1992; Plunkett 81 Marchman, 1991,1993). (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct a hypothetical genealogy of the U.S. national motto “in God we Trust” by comparing the juridical and theological concept of “depositum”. According to Philo of Alexandria, the deposit was the most sacred institutional act of ancient social life, because it had both a religious and a sociological function. According to the Epistulae to Timothy the term ‘deposit’ defined the legacy of the Christian faith of which the disciple of St. Paul was entrusted. (...) His task was to manage this legacy and to spread it among the others. Hence the deposit defined at the same time a contract based upon good faith and a symbolic space of “security”, namely a container that protected an unchangeable content: the oral knowledge transmitted by Christ to the Apostoles and, indirectly, to St. Paul. The depositum was also the procedure through which the word of Christ would acquire all its potential. On the other hand, the contract defined as “depositum” by Roman law was characterized by a centrality of the so-called bona fides and by the distinction between regular and irregular deposit. This means that the principle of good faith should lead the conducts of the manager whose task is exactly to look after an object called Christian faith. How can we interpret the word ‘trust’ according to the juridico-political remarks? The purpose of this chapter is to explain all these related issues. (shrink)

These forms would result regularly from the longer forms, audivisti, etc. The v drops out between two like vowels, and these then contract immediately . Both the long and the short forms are used, but the intervening forms audiisti, etc., do not occur in early Latin, just as diitis is not found.

Aaron Snyder and Fred Dretske present an argument for the proposition that singular causal sequences, such as S caused b, need not be related to a general regularity, that an event of type S is always followed by an event of type b. Therefore, they assert that a claim of causal relation does not require a regular observation of effect following cause or cause preceeding effect. To reinforce their assertion, they present the following case: Box R contains a randomizing (...) device; once activated it proceeds, in a perfectly random manner, to one of its one hundred different terminal states. Each of the terminal states may be supposed to be equally probable so that the probability of the box ending in state number 17 is.01. One can think of the device as embodying certain quantum mechanical processes—e.g. the emission of an electron … toward a screen which has one hundred different areas suitably marked off as terminal sights. Attached to Box R is a loaded revolver which fires when the terminal state happens to be number 17. We take this device and place it next to a cat, point the revolver at the cat and activate the box. Things go badly for the cat; the improbable occurs and the cat is killed. The cat's master, if informed of our doings, would almost certainly insist that we had killed his cat… Though we designate our actions as the cause, and the cat's death as the result, there is no regular or uniform connection between actions of the first sort and results of the latter sort … We seem to have a situation which we are inclined to describe in a way which implies the presence of a causal connection between C and E and, yet, a situation in which it is clear that in identical circumstances something of type C will not even generally be followed by something of type E. (shrink)