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Re: THEORY: storage v computation (was: RE: Language revival)

From:And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
Date:Monday, November 29, 1999, 12:14
Nik:
> And Rosta wrote: > > But the > > lesson is clear: in production, irregularity appears to confer > > no benefits (if the experimental findings are correct). > > But, it confers no HARM either. This seems to suggest that both regular > and irregular forms are stored, i.e., "cook/cooked" and "run/ran" are > both stored without computation. If one were computed, and the other > stored, one would expect one to be faster than the other.
I believe (informedly but not infallibly) that infrequent irregulars are slower to process (in production, but I would expect this to be so for reception too) than regulars. On the other hand, it has been claimed (plausibly, but not AFA-what- little-IK by a psycholinguist) that English irregular verbs are faster to process in reception than regulars. (There may be frequency effects here; I don't know the details.) So it all sort of balances out. --And.