ABSTRACT
Theories of the processing of regular and irregular past-tense verbs are divided. At the base of the theoretical controversy is the question of whether or not a concatenation rule is used to complete the past-tense forms of regular verbs such as look and need . The idea of a rule for the processing of regular past-tense forms has a long history and has received particular support from the study of the development of grammatical morphology. For example, Cazden (1968) reported that children begin by producing only irregular verb forms, and then seem to regress when they enter a stage at which they complete verbs with a past-tense morpheme. Instead of selective use, they apply this rule to all verbs, both regular (e.g., look-looked ), and irregular (e.g., give-gived ), until fi nally the children manage to apply the rule only to regular verbs and retrieve irregular verbs from the lexicon.
