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Abstract
Following acquired brain damage, a native English speaking patient (AW) encountered
problems accessing phonology in speech production, while her ability to access word
meaning appeared to be intact. In a series of tasks, AW was presented either with
a verb, and was asked to produce its past tense or past participle (walk --> "walked"),
or with a noun, and was asked to produce its plural (glove --> "gloves"). A stark
dissociation was found: while AW responded accurately with regular forms of verbs
(walked) and nouns (gloves), performance was significantly less accurate with irregular
forms (found; children). The appearance of a selective deficit for irregular forms
in conditions of impaired lexical access is in line with dual-mechanism accounts,
which proposes that irregular forms are specified in the lexicon whereas regular forms
are computed via rule-based mechanisms. In contrast, AW's data are problematic for
connectionist accounts that do not posit separate mechanisms for processing regular
and irregular forms, including the connectionist model recently proposed by Joanisse
and Seidenberg (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96 (1999) 7592)
which successfully simulated a variety of earlier neuropsychological findings. Analyses
of AW's responses shed light on further details of the representation and processing
of regular and irregular inflected forms.