Juggling Regular And Irregular Verbs: An Evaluation Of Rule- And Analogy-Based Models And The Role Of Executive Functions

Humans are remarkably good at detecting and acquiring linguistic patterns. Oneunavoidable challenge is not making overregularization errors (*goed). ExecutiveFunctions (EFs) – inhibitory control (IC) and working memory (WM) – have beenproposed as potential mechanisms to overcome such errors, but evidence is inconsistent.This thesis evaluates a central assumption of the EF accounts: regulargrammatical rules are dominant over irregular inflections. The assumption alignswith rule-based explanations, which offer separate processing for regular and irregularverbs, but contradicts analogy-based explanations that assume a shared process.Study 1 extends the analyses of an existing dataset of Dutch-speaking adults byFerreira, Roelofs, and Piai (2020). Study 2 presents a new experiment with nativeTurkish-speaking adults, tested in their first (L1; Turkish) and second languages(L2; English). In Dutch and Turkish, participants were slower when switching tothe regular inflection after repeating irregular inflection (irregular-irregular-regular;IIR) than when alternating (regular-irregular-regular; RIR), supporting rule-basedexplanations. However, IC and WM measures did not predict the IIR-RIR difference,offering no support for EF accounts. The thesis also contrasts the processingof L1 and L2, extends the exploration to non-Indo-European languages, and comparestwo morphologically distinct languages, Dutch and Turkish, offering a morecomprehensive understanding of morphological inflection.