Universals in Morphological Representation: Evidence from Italian

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The dual mechanism hypothesis argues that the apparent contrast, in English inflectional morphology, between a rule-based default procedure, generating regular past-tense forms, and listed irregular forms stored in an associative net, reflects universal constraints on the properties of possible morphological systems. This research asked whether these constraints can be shown to hold, in the ways predicted by the dual mechanism hypothesis, for Italian past-tense inflection. Experiment 1, using a cross-modal repetition priming task, showed that priming generated by regular inflected pairs (giocarono/giocare) does not differ from prim ing by irregular inflected pairs (scesero/scendere). Experiment 2, using an elicitation task where subjects produce past-tense forms for novel verbs, not only showed little evidence for the presence of an underlying default, but also demonstrated that phonological similarity can affect both regularised and irregularised elicitation patterns. The results of both experiments contrast with previous research in English, which used the same techniques, and suggest that claims about universal morphological patterns