Regular and irregular verbs have been dissociated in psycholinguistic paradigms, such as reaction time ( Ellis & Schmidt, 1998 Prasada, Pinker & Synder, 1990) and neurolinguistic studies ( Clahsen & Almazen, 1998 Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1997 Ullman, Bergida & O’Craven, 1997), strengthening the argument for a dual-mechanism model. However, irregular verbs, such as sing, bear, or hit, do not. Most English verbs form their past-tense by suffixing - ed to the verb, as in talked.

Past-tense morphology in English has been the focus of a spirited debate over the nature of cognition. Thus, the derivation of the verb (nominal or verbal) determined the past-tense preference more than semantic variables, consistent with dual-route models of verb inflection. The results showed that all the denominal verbs were rated as more acceptable for the regular inflection than the same verbs used polysemously, even though the two were semantically equally similar to the central meaning. Experiment 2 examined the acceptability of the regular and irregular past-tenses of the different verbs.

Is this regularization due to a semantic difference from the usual verb, or is it due to the application of the default rule, namely VERB + - ed suffix? In Experiment 1, participants rated the semantic similarity of the extended senses of polysemous verbs and denominal verbs to their central senses. Although English verbs can be either regular ( walk-walked) or irregular ( sing-sang), “denominal verbs” that are derived from nouns, such as the use of the verb ring derived from the noun a ring, take the regular form even if they are homophonous with an existing irregular verb: The soldiers ringed the city rather than * The soldiers rang the city.

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