| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this experimental study is to investigate the representation and processing of regular,
sub-regular and irregular verbal forms of Italian. In psycholinguistics, the debate on the
processing of regular and irregular verbs is based on the contrast between Dual Mechanism
models (Pinker and Prince, 1988; Clahsen, 1999; Caramazza, Laudanna and Romani, 1988), which
claim that regular forms are processed through the application of inflectional rules, while irregular
forms are retrieved as whole words from the associative memory, and Connectionist models
(McClelland and Patterson, 2002; Joanisse and Seidenberg, 1999; Rumelhart and McClelland,
1986), which claim that a single associative mechanism accounts for both regular and irregular
form processing.
Despite Dual Mechanism models clearly support distinct mechanisms for the representation of
regular and irregular verbs, several studies point out that this dichotomy is challenged by the
existence of families of "sub-regular" verbs, which share morpho-phonological features and
follow the same inflectional patterns.
The debate on sub-regular patterns evolved especially with respect to languages like Italian,
based on the organization into inflectional classes, each characterized by a specific regular
paradigm, and on a varying aggregation of sub-regular families.
The coexistence of multiple regular patterns and sub-regular families seems to be consistent with
the Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993; Benua, 1997, Bernhardt and Stemberger,
1998; Smolensky, 1999), which departs from the traditional concept of inflectional rule and
invokes the use of phonological constraints, based on phonological analogies between surface
forms of words and on different degrees of relevance and "violability". [edited by author] | en_US |
