Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It has long been controversial whether language behavior is best described and explained with reference to the constructs of formal linguistic theory, or with reference to information processing concepts and the communicative goals of speakers. Recent work by Kim, Pinker, Prince and Prasada (1991) argues that the vocabulary of formal grammatical theory is essential to psychological explanation. They demonstrate that speakers' evaluation of the well formedness of past-tense forms is sensitive to whether novel verb forms are perceived to be extended from nouns or verbs. 1 show this pattern of preferences to be a consequence of semantic similarity between the novel sense of the verb and the irregular verb to which it is phonologically related. The data is consistent with the tenets of functional grammar: speaker' choice of one linguistic form over another is influenced by perceived communicative gain (Kuno, 1987; Bates & MacWhinney, 1989). The salient task in judging novel verbs phonologically related to irregular verbs is guarding against miscommunication. Dizzy Dean aside, that so few mortals have ever flown out to center field testifies to speakers' success.