Neuropsychological research showing that the regular ("jump-jumped") and irregular ("drive/drove") past tense inflectional morphology can dissociate following brain damage has been important in testing claims about the cognitive and neural status of linguistic rules. These dissociations have been interpreted as evidence for two different computational systems-a rule-based system underlying the ...

If neuronal models are successful, they will account for specifically human complex behaviours. Most of these behaviours can be described as governed by rules. In recent years, much effort has been spent to elucidate the neuronal basis of rules, and many researchers have focussed on modelling rules and regularities underlying language, particularly those relevant for past-tense formation. After...

To explain processing differences between regular (e.g., start/started) and irregular (e.g., think/thought) word formation linguistic models posit either a single mechanism handling both morphological clusters or separate mechanisms for regular and irregular words. The purpose of the present study is to investigate how these processing differences map onto brain processes by assessing electroph...

Eye tracking research on situated language comprehension has shown that participants rely more on a recent event than on a plausible future event during spoken sentence comprehension. When people saw a recent action event and then they listened to a German (NP1-Verb-Adv-NP2) past or futuric present tense sentence, they preferentially looked at the recent event target over another plausible targ...

This paper presents ‘source’ as the distinctive feature for a twofold semantic categorization for Chinese modal expressions. Previous studies have characterized Chinese modals as words used to express the speaker’s opinion or attitude. Yet given the absence of morphological and syntactic distinctions in Chinese, there has been little consensus among different accounts as to within what limit th...

In 1983, when I attended my first linguistics course, taught by one Professor Rüdiger Zimmermann, Joan Bybee and Carol Moder published an article on „Morphological classes as natural categories“ in Language. In this article they argued that prototype theory can be applied to morphological classes, in particular ablaut classes in English verb morphology. Their experimental results indicated that...