Time Course of Regular and Irregular Pronunciations

Abstract In the past few years, there has been a great deal of discussion over the necessity of two processes instead of a single process to account for both regular and irregular forms. We describe some counter-intuitive naming data (the less frequent pronunciation has a shorter mean latency than the more frequent pronunciation) that cannot be accounted for by Seidenberg & McClelland who use a single measure (the phonological error score) to index both response likelihood and response time. We present two possible scenarios in which feed-forward networks could account for the data, one based on the variance of the distribution of the phonological error scores and the other based on the time course of activation. In this study, we examine the second possibility in a series of simulations using three different feed-forward networks, but find no evidence that feed-forward networks can account for the counter-intuitive data.