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

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.