Morphological Processing of the Past-Tense Forms of Japanese Consonant-Stem and Vowel-Stem Verbs

摘要

According to dual-mechanism models, the inflections of regular past-tense verbs are processed by the rule-based system, whereas those of irregular past-tense verbs are processed by the associative system. Whether these dual systems are applicable to Japanese verbs has yet to be clarified' by using a questionnaire experiment and a lexical decision experiment, this study therefore investigated which of the five subgroups of Japanese verbs (Fushimi et al., 2004) has the frequency effect (lemma frequency). This effect was found for II verbs and vowel-stem verbs, whereas it was not found for CC, Cl, and IC consonant-stem verbs in the first experiment. The frequency effect was found for CC, and Cl consonant-stem verbs but no clear frequency effect was found for lexical decision latencies of IC verbs, II verbs or vowel-stem verbs in the second experiment. These results indicated the involvement of two different systems in processing the past-tense forms of Japanese verbs.