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Semantic density and past-tense formation in three Germanic languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

R. Harald Baayen  and
Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín
R. Harald Baayen*
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín*
Affiliation:
Medical Research Council—Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (UK)
*
Baayen, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics PO Box 310 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands [baayen@mpi.nl]
Moscoso del Prado Martín, Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit 15 Chaucer Road Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK [fermin.moscoso-del-prado-martin@mrc.cam.ac.uk]
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Abstract

It is widely believed that the difference between regular and irregular verbs is restricted to form. This study questions that belief. We report a series of lexical statistics showing that irregular verbs cluster in denser regions in semantic space. Compared to regular verbs, irregular verbs tend to have more semantic neighbors that in turn have relatively many other semantic neighbors that are morphologically irregular. We show that this greater semantic density for irregulars is reflected in association norms, familiarity ratings, visual lexical-decision latencies, and word-naming latencies. Meta-analyses of the materials of two neuroimaging studies show that in these studies, regularity is confounded with differences in semantic density. Our results challenge the hypothesis of the supposed formal encapsulation of rules of inflection and support lines of research in which sensitivity to probability is recognized as intrinsic to human language.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , September 2005 , pp. 666 - 698
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the Linguistic Society of America

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