Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense

‘Fell’ primes ‘fall’, but does ‘bell’ prime ‘ball’? Masked priming with irregularly-inflected primes

“…Specifically, as it has been noted previously (Bybee & Slobin, 1982), irregular past tense forms are not completely idiosyncratic from an orthographic point of view, but tend to cluster in islands of sub-regularity. For example, the past tense forms of 'meet', 'bleed', 'feed' and 'breed' are 'met', 'bled', 'fed' and 'bred'; similarly, 'spend', 'send', 'bend' and 'lend' have inflected forms that are obtained by changing the final '-d' to a '-t' ('spent', 'sent', 'bent' and 'lent').…”

Evidence for a learning bias against saltatory phonological alternations

“…First, participants may have been giving product-oriented responses (Bybee & Slobin, 1982). In other words, participants may have responded based on the form of the product (i.e., the plural word) Participants may have responded to any untrained cases by matching the frequency of the plural endings that they heard during training.…”

Accessing Words from the Mental Lexicon

“…There is evidence suggesting that inflectional suffixes, e.g. -ed, pattern differently in errors than non-morphemic word endings, supporting a morphological interpretation of inflectional errors (Bybee and Slobin 1982). The existence of naturally occurring derivational errors may be taken as support that roots and derivational affixes are stored separately (Fromkin 1973).…”