The significance of the English past tense in current cognitive science is that it offers a clear contrast between a potentially rule-based system-the procedures for forming the regular past tense-and an unpredictable and idiosyncratic set of irregular forms. This contrast has become a focus for a wide-ranging debate about whether mental computation requires the use of symbols. Highly regular combinatorial phenomena, such as the regular past tense, are prime candidates for rule-based symbolic computation. Earlier research concentrated on the evidence for this during language acquisition, looking at how children learned the English regular and irregular verb systems. Over the last five years attention has shifted towards the properties of the adult system, and we review here some recent research into the neural correlates of the two types of procedure. The evidence suggests that there are divergences in the neural systems underlying the generation and perception of regular and irregular forms. Regular inflected forms seem to involve primarily combinatorial processes, while irregular forms appear to have a hybrid status, sharing their semantic properties with the regular forms but diverging in the phonological domain, where their form representations are stored as complete units. This indicates that the regular and irregular past tenses may not, after all, provide a clean contrast in the types of mental computation they implicate.

中文翻译：

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规则、表述和英语过去时

英语过去时在当前认知科学中的重要性在于，它在潜在的基于规则的系统（形成规则过去时的程序）与一组不可预测和特殊的不规则形式之间提供了清晰的对比。这种对比已成为关于心理计算是否需要使用符号的广泛争论的焦点。高度规则的组合现象，例如规则的过去时，是基于规则的符号计算的主要候选者。早期的研究集中在语言习得过程中的证据，研究儿童如何学习英语规则和不规则动词系统。在过去的五年里，注意力已经转移到成人系统的特性上，我们在这里回顾了最近对这两种程序的神经相关性的一些研究。证据表明，规则和不规则形式的产生和感知背后的神经系统存在分歧。规则屈折形式似乎主要涉及组合过程，而不规则形式似乎具有混合状态，与规则形式共享其语义属性，但在语音域中存在分歧，在语音域中，它们的形式表示被存储为完整的单元。这表明，规则和不规则过去时终究可能无法在它们所涉及的心理计算类型中提供清晰的对比。规则屈折形式似乎主要涉及组合过程，而不规则形式似乎具有混合状态，与规则形式共享其语义属性，但在语音域中存在分歧，在语音域中，它们的形式表示被存储为完整的单元。这表明，规则和不规则过去时终究可能无法在它们所涉及的心理计算类型中提供清晰的对比。规则屈折形式似乎主要涉及组合过程，而不规则形式似乎具有混合状态，与规则形式共享其语义属性，但在语音域中存在分歧，在语音域中，它们的形式表示被存储为完整的单元。这表明，规则和不规则过去时终究可能无法在它们所涉及的心理计算类型中提供清晰的对比。