Phonological Priming and Irregular Past

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a sentence-production task, the vowel of the base form or past-tense form of an irregular verb is primed by an identical vowel in the subject noun (e.g., base vowel "cream," past-tense vowel "chrome," unrelated vowel slot). For verbs with different vowels in the base form and past-tense form, phonological priming of the base vowel or of the past-tense vowel increases the rate of overregularization errors such as "*freezed" as compared to an unrelated vowel prime. For verbs with the same vowel in the base and past-tense forms (e.g., "hit/hit"), phonological priming has no effect on the rate of overregularization errors. It is argued that irregular forms are not produced in a specialized subnetwork for (irregular) past-tense forms, but are produced in the general lexical system simultaneous with general phonological processing. Implications for theories of inflectional morphology are discussed.