The past and future of the past tense. Pinker, S. & Ullman, M. T Trends Cogn Sci, 6(11):456-463, 2002.
abstract   bibtex   
What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas regular forms can be computed by a concatenation rule, which requires the procedural system. Irregulars have the psychological, linguistic and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars often have the signatures of grammatical processing. Furthermore, because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it whenever memory fails.
@Article{Pinker2002a,
  author   = {Steven Pinker and Michael T Ullman},
  journal  = {Trends Cogn Sci},
  title    = {The past and future of the past tense.},
  year     = {2002},
  number   = {11},
  pages    = {456-463},
  volume   = {6},
  abstract = {What is the interaction between storage and computation in language
	processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules?
	What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models
	of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the
	brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates
	on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms
	are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas
	regular forms can be computed by a concatenation rule, which requires
	the procedural system. Irregulars have the psychological, linguistic
	and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars
	often have the signatures of grammatical processing. Furthermore,
	because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it
	whenever memory fails.},
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