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The Past and Future of the Past Tense the Past-Tense Debate

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The Past and Future of the Past Tense the Past-Tense Debate 456 Opinion TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.11 November 2002 The Past-Tense Debate and weaknesses of connectionist and rule-based The past and future of models of language and cognition [8]. More generally, because inflections like the past tense are simple, frequent, and prevalent across languages, and the past tense because the regular and irregular variants can be equated for complexity and meaning, they have served as a test case for issues such as the Steven Pinker and Michael T.Ullman neurocognitive reality of rules and other symbol-manipulating operations and the interaction between storage and computation in What is the interaction between storage and computation in language cognitive processing [5–7]. processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are In this article we defend the side of this debate that the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? maintains that rules are indispensable for explaining How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English the past tense, and by extension, language and past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the cognitive processes [3–5,14]. We review what the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of theory does and doesn’t claim, the relevant evidence, declarative memory, whereas regular forms can be computed by a the connectionist challenges, and our hopes for the concatenation rule, which requires the procedural system. Irregulars have the future of the debate. psychological, linguistic and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars often have the signatures of grammatical processing. The Words-and-Rules theory Furthermore, because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it The Words and Rules (WR) theory claims that the whenever memory fails. regular–irregular distinction is an epiphenomenon of the design of the human language faculty, in For fifteen years, the English past tense has been particular, the distinction between lexicon and the subject of a debate on the nature of language grammar made in most traditional theories of processing. The debate began with the report of a language. The lexicon is a subdivision of memory connectionist model by Rumelhart and McClelland [1] containing (among other things) the thousands of and a critique by Pinker and Prince [2], and has arbitrary sound–meaning pairings that underlie the since been the subject of many papers, conferences morphemes and simple words of a language. The and simulation models [3–7] (see also McClelland grammar is a system of productive, combinatorial and Patterson in this issue [8]). operations that assemble morphemes and simple The past tense is of theoretical interest because it words into complex words, phrases and sentences. embraces two strikingly different phenomena. Irregular forms are just words, acquired and stored Regular inflection, as in walk-walked and like other words, but with a grammatical feature like play-played, applies predictably to thousands of verbs ‘past tense’ incorporated into their lexical entries. and is productively generalized to neologisms such as Regular forms, by contrast, can be productively spam-spammed and mosh-moshed, even by preschool generated by a rule, just like phrases and sentences. children [9]. Irregular inflection, as in come-came and A stored inflected form of a verb blocks the application feel-felt, applies in unpredictable ways to some of the rule to that verb (e.g. brought pre-empts Steven Pinker* 180 verbs, and is seldom generalized; rather, the bringed). Elsewhere (by default) the rule applies: Dept of Brain and regular suffix is often overgeneralized by children to it concatenates -ed with the symbol ‘V’, and thus can Cognitive Sciences, these irregular forms, as in holded and breaked [10,11]. inflect any word categorized as a verb (see Fig. 1). NE20-413, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, A simple explanation is that irregular forms must be Irregular forms, then, do not require an ‘exception Cambridge, MA 02139, stored in memory, whereas regular forms can be module’. They arise because the two subsystems USA. generated by a rule that suffixes -ed to the stem [12,13]. overlap in their expressive power: a given *e-mail: Rumelhart and McClelland challenged that combination of features can be expressed by words or [email protected] explanation with a pattern-associator model (RMM) rules. Thus either a word (irregular) or a rule-product Michael Ullman that learned to associate phonological features of the (regular) can satisfy the demand of a syntactic or Dept of Neuroscience, Research Building EP-04, stem with phonological features of the past-tense semantic representation that a feature such as past Georgetown University, form. It thereby acquired several hundred regular tense be overtly expressed. Diachronically, an 3900 Reservoir Rd, NW, and irregular forms and overgeneralized -ed to some irregular is born when (for various reasons) learners Washington DC 20007, of the irregulars. memorize a complex word outright, rather than USA. e-mail: michael@ The past tense has served as one of the main parsing it into a stem and an affix that codes the georgetown.edu empirical phenomena used to contrast the strengths feature autonomously [3]. http://tics.trends.com 1364-6613/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S1364-6613(02)01990-3 Opinion TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.11 November 2002 457 combinatorial apparatus [1,18,19]. The key to Word stem (e.g. walk or hold) these pattern associators is that rather than linking Grammatical feature (e.g. past tense) a word to a word stored in memory, they link sounds to sounds. Because similar words share sounds, their representations are partly superimposed, and any association formed to one is automatically Lexicon Grammar generalized to the others. This allows such models V suffix to acquire families of similar forms more easily X than arbitrary sets, and to generalize the patterns walk -edpast to new similar words. Having been trained on X suffix fling-flung and cling-clung, they may generalize V V to spling-splung (as children and adults hold heldpast occasionally do [20,21]); and having been trained on flip-flipped and clip-clipped, they generalize to plip plipped. V V WR is descended from a third approach: the lexicalist theories of Jackendoff, Lieber, and others, heldpast V suffix who recognized that many morphological phenomena are neither arbitrary lists nor fully walk -ed past systematic and productive [22–25]. They posited Used for: roots, idioms, irregulars, phrases, sentences, any ‘lexical redundancy rules’, which do not freely some regulars regular form generate new forms but merely capture patterns of Form of redundancy in the lexicon, and allow sporadic computation: lookup, association combination, unification generalization by analogy. Pinker and Prince proposed that lexical redundancy rules are not Subdivision of: declarative memory procedural system rules at all, but consequences of the superpositional Associated with: words, facts rules, skills nature of memory: similar items are easier to learn than arbitrary sets, and new items resembling old Principal ones tend to inherit their properties. They argued substrate: temporo-parietal cortex frontal cortex, basal ganglia that RMM’s successes came from implementing TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences this feature of memory, and proposed the WR theory as a lexicalist compromise between the generative Fig. 1. Simplified illustration of the Words-and-Rules (WR) theory and the Declarative/Procedural and connectionist extremes. Irregulars are stored (DP) hypothesis. When a word must be inflected, the lexicon and grammar are accessed in parallel. in a lexicon with the superpositional property of If an inflected form for a verb (V) exists in memory, as with irregulars (e.g. held), it will be retrieved; a signal indicating a match blocks the operation of the grammatical suffixation process via an pattern associators; regulars can be generated or inhibitory link from lexicon to grammar, preventing the generation of holded. If no inflected form parsed by rules. is matched, the grammatical processor concatenates the appropriate suffix with the stem, Ullman and colleagues have recently extended the generating a regular form. WR theory to a hypothesis about the neurocognitive substrate of lexicon and grammar. According to the The WR theory contrasts with classical theories of Declarative/Procedural (DP) hypothesis [5,26], lexical generative phonology and their descendents, such as memory is a subdivision of declarative memory, which those of Chomsky and Halle [15–17], which generate stores facts, events and arbitrary relations [27,28]. irregular forms by affixing an abstract morpheme to The consolidation of new declarative memories the stem and applying rules that alter the stem’s requires medial-temporal lobe structures, in phonological composition. Such theories are designed particular the hippocampus. Long-term retention to account for the fact that most irregular forms are depends largely on neocortex, especially temporal not completely arbitrary but fall into families and temporo-parietal regions; other structures are displaying patterns, as in ring-rang, sink-sank, important for actively retrieving and searching for sit-sat, and feel-felt, sleep-slept, bleed-bled. A problem these memories. Grammatical processing, by for this view is that irregular families admit contrast, depends on the procedural system, which numerous positive and negative counterexamples underlies the learning and control of motor and and borderline cases, so any set of rules will be cognitive skills, particularly those involving complex and laden with exceptions, unless it posits sequences [27,28]. It is subserved by the basal implausibly abstract underlying representations ganglia, and by the frontal cortex to which they (e.g. rin for run, which allows the verb to undergo the project – in the case of language, particularly Broca’s same rules as sing-sang-sung). area and neighboring anterior cortical regions.
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