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A B S T R A C TThis study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (five-to seven-year olds, eleven-to twelve-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. We found contrasts between the production of regular and irregular forms in both children and adults, with respect to the production latencies and types of morphological error. Children overapplied the regular patterns to forms that are irregular in the adult language, but not vice versa. High-frequency irregular participles were produced faster (and amongst the children more accurately) than low-frequency ones, whereas regular participles yielded a reverse frequency effect, i.e. longer production latencies for high-frequency forms than for low-frequency ones, in the two groups of children as well as in one subgroup of adults. We explain these findings from the perspective of dual-mechanism models of inflection arguing that the mental mechanisms and representations for processing morphologically complex words (' words ' and 'rules ') are the same in children and adults, and that the observed child/adult differences in [*] The research in this paper has been supported by a German Science Foundation grant to HC (SFB282/C7). We thank Axel Huth, Rebecca Groß, and Peter Prü fert, for assistance in designing, administering and analysing the experiments, Ricardo Russo and Phil Scholfield for detailed statistical advice, and Claudia Felser, Ingrid Sonnenstuhl, and two anonymous JCL reviewers for comments and helpful suggestions.

We present results from two cross-modal morphological priming experiments investigating regular person and number inflection on finite verbs in German. We found asymmetries in the priming patterns between different affixes that can be predicted from the structure of the paradigm. We also report data from language disorders which indicate that inflectional errors produced by language-impaired adults and children tend to occur within a given paradigm dimension, rather than randomly across the paradigm. We conclude that morphological paradigms are used by the human language processor and can be systematically affected in language disorders.