Dual-mechanism morphology refers to a family of psycholinguistic models which hold that morphologically complex word forms can be processed both associatively, i.e. through stored full-form representations and by rules that decompose or parse inflected or derived word forms into morphological constituents. We present a brief overview of some relevant experimental results on English and other languages and of different variants of dual-mechanism models that are currently discussed in the literature. Finally, we briefly outline how dual-mechanism morphology can be implemented into morphological theory. Our understanding of how an adult native speaker/hearer processes inflected word forms in real time has increased considerably over the last decade. Experimental studies using a range of different psycholinguistic methods and techniques, e.g. lexical decision, priming, event-related potentials (ERPs), have led to a number of

This study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low word-form frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (5-to-7-year olds, 11-to-12-year olds) and 35 adult native speakers of German listened to stem forms of verbs presented in a sentential context and were asked to produce corresponding participle forms as quickly and accurately as possible. Dependent variables were the subjects' participle-production latencies and error rates.

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Does the language processing system make use of abstract grammatical categories and representations that are not directly visible from the surface form of a linguistic expression? This study examines stem-formation processes and conjugation classes, a case of ‘pure ’ morphology that provides insight into the role of grammatical structure in language processing. We report results from a cross-modal priming experiment examining 1 st and 3 rd conjugation verb forms in Portuguese. Although items were closely matched with respect to a range of non-morphological factors, distinct priming patterns were found for 1 st and 3 rd conjugation stems. We attribute the observed priming patterns to different representations of conjugational stems, combinatorial morphologically-structured ones for 1 st conjugation and unanalyzed morphologicallyunstructured ones for 3 rd conjugation stems. Our findings underline the importance of morphology for language comprehension indicating that morphological analysis goes beyond the identification of grammatical morphemes.

In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon known as the Optional Infinitive (OI) Stage in child Spanish. During this stage children optionally mark tense on verbs (e.g. Wexler 1990, 1994, 1998;

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How do children cope with the general regularities that govern language while keeping track of the exceptions to them? This question has been the subject of debate for many years and it is still an open question. In particular, learning the English past tense has been studied in depth given that it is a simple problem that combines a rulelike process with many irregularities. In this paper we try to extend these studies to a quite more complex problem: the Spanish verb inflectional system. This paper presents an ACT-R model that shows the well-known U-shaped learning and mimics in many aspects the process of learning exhibited by children. Thus, our approach shows how a highly inflected morphology system can be acquired in terms of dual-mechanism theories and sheds light on the posible structures involved in general language acquisition.