Generalisation of regular and irregular morphological patterns

Abstract Both regular inflectional patterns (walk-walked) and irregular ones (swing-swung) can be applied productively to novel words (e.g. wug-wugged; spling -splung). Theories of generative phonology attribute both generalisations to rules; connectionist theories attribute both to analogies in a pattern associator network; hybrid theories attribute regular (fully predictable default) generalisations to a rule and irregular generalisations to a rote memory with pattern-associator properties. In three experiments and three simulations, we observe the process of generalising morphological patterns in humans and two-layer connectionist networks. Replicating Bybee and Moder (1983), we find that people's willingness to generalise from existing irregular verbs to novel ones depends on the global similarity between them (e.g. spling is readily inflectable as splung, but nist is not inflectable as nust). In contrast, generalisability of the regular suffix does not appear to depend on similarity to existing regul...

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