Spanish verbal inflection: A single- or dual-route system?1

Spanish verbal inflection Four studies of Spanish morphology are examined that seem to support the dual-route model because they demonstrate an asymetry between regular and irregular verbal inflections. In Rodriguez-Fornells et al. (2002), ERPs were measured during a priming study. Regular targets demonstrated an increased positivity between 250 and 450 ms after the presentation of the stimulus, but irregulars did not. However, these findings are suspect because it is not possible to control for the effects of previous knowledge of the word, orthographic overlap, and semantic similarity at the same time. Yaden’s subjects (2003) produced inflected forms of nonce infinitives. They resulted in many errors that regularized irregular inflections, but few that irregularized regulars. Clahsen et al. (2002) also found more regularization than irregularization errors in children. Single-route analogical simulations of Yaden’s test items and of errors in acquisition yielded the same dissociation between common regularization uncommon irregularization. The experiment by Brovetto and Ullman (2005) also entailed inflecting nonce verbs