(This time around, I have included a response paper that I originally wrote for a 400 level linguistics class at UMASS. I have made minor revisions, and this article is shorter than the original paper. For example, I have not included the original speech error list.
If anybody has any criticisms, comments, or additional information on my paper or the subject I would be glad to hear them.)
Irregular verbs and
past participles are stored and accessed differently in the brain
than regular verbs. During speech, irregular verbs and verbs that use
the past participle are often used in the wrong form, nevertheless
the mispronounced sentence still makes sense to the listener. Just as
children often add the suffix -ed to verbs in order to place them in
the past tense, adults tend to make similar mistakes with the
irregular and past participle verbs, showing us that unconscious grammatical
decisions are being made.
When looking for
data, the criteria used was recorded speech errors overheard in
everyday discussions on the UMASS campus. The errors collected were written down at the exact
time and place of the utterance. From the list, errors were compiled together into appendix A. In this case the errors
were irregular verbs and past participles used in the wrong tense.
Later, several examples were traded with other students in the
Linguistics class. Sentence [1] is a basic example of the speech
errors being dealt with.
[1] Yeah and then I
drunk it.
Sentence
[2] is an example of the speech errors where a past participle was
not used.
[2] He
brung us the paperwork yesterday.
While
these errors were encountered often, there was never a case where a
regular verb was used in the wrong tense. The sentence below is an
example of such a nonexistent sentence:
[*] She
had heal the wound.
In the
case of regular verbs, it is nearly impossible to get the tense wrong
because the form never changes. However, without realizing it, people
seem to know when a verb is irregular and that they need to change
the form of it some how. Often the case may seem to be made up, as in
sentences such as [3] and [8].
[3] I
throwed him the keys.
[8]
Yeah, I dreamed of the same thing.
The fact
that people need to change the word reflects that the speaker has
identified irregular verbs as being different from regular verbs, and
need to be handled differently; the speaker may recognize that the word
needs to be slightly conjugated, although not necessarily conjugated
correctly.
Proposed
methods to study this hypothesis would be to present a subject with
an identification test with a mixed group of sentences containing
regular and irregular verbs in both correct and incorrect tenses.
Then letting the subject decide which sentences are fluent or not
fluent from a scale on one to five, and then mapping the results
against one another. This will provide us with a graphic
representation of which sentences are considered more fluent than
others and at which point sentences become completely disfluent
altogether.
Further
research could give us answers to questions such as; at what point
does the use of the wrong tense make the sentence incomprehensible?
Which sentences fall in the middle? Every sentence in Appendix A is
not grammatically correct, but we still understand what is being
communicated. For example:
[6] I
ain't got any.
Furthermore,
in a separate study subjects could be tested by asking them casual
questions where full sentence responses from them would be likely to
include irregular verbs and past participles such as “Tell me about
your last dream.” or “tell me who brought you into the room”.
Separate subjects could be asked the same questions, already using
the wrong form (“Tell me about when you last dreamed.”, “Who
brung you into the room?”) If the subject answers the questions
while still using the incorrect form it would mean that they still
completely understand the sentence, if they used the same incorrect
form when answering a question it may mean that they have not dried
to think about the grammar of a sentence anymore because there seems
to be is already enough grammatical information available. However, this could also be seen as a form of
priming.
If the subjects were monitored using an ERP
or fMRI device, it could be
possible to see which neurons fire, and where in the brain they fire when a
sentence that uses an irregular, regular, or grammatically
incorrect sentence is uttered. Certain
forms of irregular verbs may also be considered correct to the
speaker or listener depending on colloquial speech or even slang. In
which case a national or international survey or research which draws
in subjects from various English speaking cultures could be compared
with the same identification task mentioned above. An abnormality in
verb conjugation from a group of speakers from a certain region may
reflect this. Examples include “sunk” and “sank”, or possibly
even the use of “y'all” as “you all” and which verb tenses
are often used along with it.
From a
connectionist perspective is there a way to map verb conjugation in a
similar way to word recognition? If this was the case maybe it would
be possible to discriminate between when speakers use the past
participle and when they don't. Is it possible that we may be
subconsciously communicating something when we do or do not use the
past participle? Either way, which mental processes are, or are not taking place?
Apendix A
Errors Involving wrong verb form being
used.
Yeah, and then I drunk it. Friend
(drank, had drunk)
He brung us the paperwork
yesterday. Customer (brought)
I throwed him the keys! Father
(threw)
I hate it when I make coffee and
it don't get drank. Traded (nobody drinks it)
I sweeped the floor. Traded
(swept)
I aint got any! Traded (I don't
have any)
He had took the receipts! Coworker
(had taken)
Yeah, I've dreamed of the same
thing. Student (I've dreamt)
