present and past tense of irregular verbs

The findings support the assumption that irregular verbs are processed by rule-based mechanisms because of subregularities of their past tense inflection. ERPs for pseudoword past tense forms showed a similar gradual modulation of N400. Irregular verbs never follow any particular rules while changing themselves into different tense forms, though an irregular verb does some addition of.

Most interestingly, the P600 amplitude for the incorrect forms was gradually modulated by the type of anomaly with medium amplitude for consistent past tense forms and largest amplitude for inconsistent past tense forms. The majority of verbs, called ‘Regular verbs’, follow the same pattern and create the past simple and the past participle using the same word ending, -ed. ERPs for real words revealed a biphasic ERP pattern consisting of a negativity and P600 for both incorrect forms in comparison to the correct equivalents. Correspondingly, in a second experimental block, pseudowords (e.g., tang/*tung/*ting) were presented. The critical past tense form was correct (e.g., er sang ) or incorrect by being either partially consistent (e.g., *er sung ) or inconsistent (e.g., *er sing ) with the proposed morphological principles. Participants read series of irregular verb inflection including present tense, past participle, and past tense forms embedded in minimal syntactic contexts. We tested this latter hypothesis by examining alternations of irregular German verbs as well as pseudowords using ERPs. These subregularities are computed by the syntactic system. Recent morphological accounts, however, hold that irregular inflection is not entirely rule-free but relies on morphological principles. Past tense inflection of regular verbs is assumed to be generated by a syntactic rule (e.g., show-ed), whereas irregular verbs consist of rather unsystematic alternations (e.g., caught) represented as lexical entries. The main difference between regular and irregular verbs is in the past participle and past simple. Neuropsychological research investigating mental grammar and lexicon has largely been based on the processing of regular and irregular inflection.

Present and past tense of irregular verbs