Semantic density and past-tense formation in three germanic languages

It is widely believed that the difference between regular and irregular herbs 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 irregular, 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 ill which sensitivity to probability is recognized is intrinsic to human language.