Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When native and non-native English speakers inflect novel verb forms for the past tense, non-natives are more likely toproduce irregular (non -ed) forms than natives (Cuskley et al., 2015). We test whether participants can reverse-engineerthe correct present tense stem from regular and irregular past tense forms of novel verbs. All participants are better able toidentify the stem of regularly inflected forms than irregular forms, but we find no difference between native and non-nativespeakers. Phonological similarity to existing irregulars interferes with recognition of regularly inflected non-verbs (e.g.,proximity of sleened to sling/slung makes it more difficult than drocked). While non-natives are more likely to produceirregular past tense forms, they are not better than native speakers at interpreting them. Non-native over-production ofirregulars may reflect statistical patterns in their more limited input, but these factors do not seem to affect the process ofinferring stems.