Abstract
This article presents fMRI evidence bearing on dual-mechanism versus connectionist theories of inflectional morphology. Ten participants were scanned at 4 Tesla as they covertly generated the past tenses of real and nonce (nonword) verbs presented auditorily. Regular past tenses (e.g., walked, wugged) and irregular past tenses (e.g., took, slept) produced similar patterns of activation in the posterior temporal lobe in both hemispheres. In contrast, there was greater activation in left and right inferior frontal gyrus for regular past tenses than for irregular past tenses. Similar previous results have been taken as evidence for the dual-mechanism theory of the past tense (Pinker & Ullman, 2002). However, additional analyses indicated that irregulars that were phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., slept, fled, sold) produced the same level of activation as did regulars, and significantly more activation than did irregulars that were not phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., took, gave). Thus, activation patterns were predicted by phonological characteristics of the past tense rather than by the rule-governed versus exception distinction that is central to the dual-mechanism framework. The results are consistent with a constraint satisfaction model in which phonological, semantic, and other probabilistic constraints jointly determine the past tense, with different degrees of involvement for different verbs.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Beretta, A., Campbell, C., Carr, T. H., Huang, J., Schmitt, L. M., Christianson, K., & Cao, Y. (2003). An ER—fMRI investigation of morphological inflection in German reveals that the brain makes a distinction between regular and irregular forms. Brain & Language, 85, 67–92.
Berko, J. (1958). The child’s learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150–177.
Binder, J. R., Frost, J. A., Hammeke, T. A., Cox, R. W., Rao, S. M., & Prieto, T. (1997). Human brain language areas identified by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 353–362.
Bird, H., Lambon Ralph, M. A., Seidenberg, M. S., McClelland, J. L., & Patterson, K. (2003). Deficits in phonology and past tense morphology: What is the connection? Journal of Memory & Language, 48, 502–526.
Blumstein, S. E., Milberg, W., Brown, T., Hutchinson, A., Kurowski, K., & Burton, M. W. (2000). The mapping from sound structure to the lexicon in aphasia: Evidence from rhyme and repetition priming. Brain & Language, 72, 75–99.
Burton, M. W. (2001). The role of inferior frontal cortex in phonological processing. Cognitive Science, 25, 695–709.
Bybee, J. L., & Slobin, D. I. (1982). Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense. Language, 58, 265–289.
Coltheart, M. (1981). The MRC psycholinguistic database. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33A, 497–505.
Daugherty, K., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1992). Rules or connections? The past tense revisited. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 259–264). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Devlin, J. T., Jamison, H. L., Matthews, P. M., & Gonnerman, L. M. (2004). Morphology and the internal structure of words. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101, 14984–14988.
Devlin, J. T., Matthews, P. M., & Rushworth, M. F. S. (2003). Semantic processing in the left inferior prefrontal cortex: A combined functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 71–84.
Dhond, R. P., Marinkovic, K., Dale, A. M., Witzel, T., & Halgren, E. (2003). Spatiotemporal maps of past-tense verb inflection. NeuroImage, 19, 91–100.
Forman, S. D., Cohen, J. D., Fitzgerald, M., Eddy, W. F., Mintun, M. A., & Noll, D. C. (1995). Improved assessment of significant activation in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Use of a cluster-size threshold. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 33, 636–647.
Gold, B. T., & Buckner, R. L. (2002). Common prefrontal regions coactivate with dissociable posterior regions during controlled semantic and phonological tasks. Neuron, 35, 803–812.
Halle, M., & Mohanan, K. P. (1985). Segmental phonology of modern English. Linguistic Inquiry, 16, 57–116.
Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2004). Computing the meanings of words in reading: Cooperative division of labor between visual and phonological processes. Psychological Review, 111, 662–720.
Haskell, T. R., MacDonald, M. C., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2003). Language learning and innateness: Some implications of compounds research. Cognitive Psychology, 47, 119–163.
Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2000). Towards a functional neuroanatomy of speech perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 131–138.
Jaeger, J. J., Lockwood, A. H., Kemmerer, D. L., Van Valin, R. D., Murphy, B. W., & Khalak, H. G. (1996). A positron emission tomographic study of regular and irregular verb morphology in English. Language, 72, 451–497.
Joanisse, M. F., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1999). Impairments in verb morphology after brain injury: A connectionist model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96, 7592–7597
Lavric, A., Pizzagalli, D., Forstmeier, S., & Rippon, G. (2001). A double-dissociation of English past-tense production revealed by event-related potentials and low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA). Clinical Neurophysiology, 112, 1833–1849.
MacWhinney, B., & Leinbach, J. (1991). Implementations are not conceptualizations: Revising the verb learning model. Cognition, 29, 121–157.
Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189–256.
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M. [T]., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57, 1–182.
Martin, A., Wiggs, C. L., Ungerleider, L. G., & Haxby, J. V. (1996). Neural correlates of category-specific knowledge. Nature, 379, 649–652.
McClelland, J. L., & Patterson, K. (2002). Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 465–472.
Menon, R. S. (2002). Postacquisition suppression of large-vessel BOLD signals in high-resolution fMRI. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 47, 1–9.
Moore, C. J., & Price, C. J. (1999). Three distinct regions for word and picture naming in the ventral visual pathway. NeuroImage, 10, 181–192.
Ogawa, S., Tank, D. W., Menon, R., Ellermann, J. M., Kim, S. G., Merkle, H., & Ugurbil, K. (1992). Intrinsic signal changes accompanying sensory stimulation: Functional brain mapping with magnetic resonance imaging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 89, 5951–5955.
Patterson, K., Lambon Ralph, M. A., Hodges, J. R., & McClelland, J. L. (2001). Deficits in irregular past-tense verb morphology associated with degraded semantic knowledge. Neuropsychologia, 39, 709–724.
Pinker, S. (1991). Rules of language. Science, 253, 530–535.
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. New York: Basic Books.
Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition, 28, 73–193.
Pinker, S., & Ullman, M. T. (2002). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 456–463.
Plunkett, K., & Marchman, V. (1993). From rote learning to system building: Acquiring verb morphology in children and connectionist nets. Cognition, 48, 21–69.
Poldrack, R. A., Wagner, A. D., Prull, M. W., Desmond, J. E., Glover, G. H., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (1999). Functional specialization for semantic and phonological processing in the left inferior prefrontal cortex. NeuroImage, 10, 15–35.
Prasada, S., & Pinker, S. (1993). Generalisation of regular and irregular morphological patterns. Language & Cognitive Processes, 8, 1–56.
Price, C. J., Moore, C. J., Humphreys, G. W., & Wise, R. J. S. (1997). Segregating semantic from phonological processes during reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 727–733.
Ramscar, M. (2002). The role of meaning in inflection: Why the past tense does not require a rule. Cognitive Psychology, 45, 45–94.
Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In D. E. Rumelhart, J. L. McClelland, & the PDP Research Group (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Vol. 2: Psychological and biological models (pp. 216–271). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Seidenberg, M. S., & Arnoldussen, A. (2003). The brain makes a distinction between hard and easy stimuli: Comments on Beretta et al. Brain & Language, 85, 527–530.
Seidenberg, M. S., & Gonnerman, L. (2000). Explaining derivational morphology as the convergence of codes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 353–361.
Seidenberg, M. S., & Hoeffner, J. H. (1998). Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense processing. Language, 74, 104–122.
Seidenberg, M. S., & Joanisse, M. F. (2003). Show us the model. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 106–107.
Spencer, A. (1991). Morphological theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Talairach, J., & Tournoux, P. (1988). Co-planar stereotaxic atlas of the human brain (M. Rayport, Trans.). New York: Thieme.
Tyler, L. K., Randall, B., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2002). Phonology and neuropsychology of the English past tense. Neuropsychologia, 40, 1154–1166.
Ullman, M. T. (2001). A neurocognitive perspective on language: The declarative procedural model. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 717–726.
Ullman, M. T., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., Hickok, G., Growdon, J. H., Koroshetz, W. J., & Pinker, S. (1997). A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 266–276.
Xiong, J., Gao, J., Lancaster, J. L., & Fox, P. T. (1995). Clustered pixels analysis for functional MRI activation studies in the human brain. Human Brain Mapping, 3, 1–15.
Zeno, S. M., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator’s word frequency guide. Brewster, NY: Touchstone Applied Science Associates.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation to M.F.J., and by National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.) Grants KO2 MH 01188 and RO1 MH58723 to M.S.S. We thank J. Gati and C. Thomas for assistance with fMRI imaging and analyses and the Robarts Research Institute (London, ON) for fMRI services. We are grateful to Jason Zevin, Matthew Lambon Ralph, Karalyn Patterson, and James McClelland for their useful comments on this work.
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Joanisse, M.F., Seidenberg, M.S. Imaging the past: Neural activation in frontal and temporal regions during regular and irregular past-tense processing. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 5, 282–296 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.5.3.282
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.5.3.282