On Learning the Past Tenses of English Verbs

Abstract

Scholars of language and psycholinguistics have been among the first to stress the importance of rules in describing human behavior. The reason for this is obvious. Many aspects of language can be character- ized by rules, and the speakers of natural languages speak the language correctly. Therefore, systems of rules are useful in characterizing what they will and will not say. Though we all make mistakes when we speak, we have a pretty good ear for what is right and what is wrong- and our judgments of correctness-or grammaticality-are generally even easier to characterize by rules than actual utterances. On the evidence that what we will and won t say and what we will and won t accept can be characterized by rules, it has been argued that in some sense, we "know" the rules of our language. The sense in which we know them is not the same as the sense in which we know such "rules" as "i before e except after c," however, since we need not necessarily be able to state the rules explicitly. We know them in a way that allows us to use them to make judgments of grammaticality, it is often said , or to speak and understand, but this knowledge is not in a form or location that permits it to be encoded into a communicable ver- bal statement. Because of this, this knowledge is said to be implicit. So far there is considerable agreement. However, the exact charac- terization of implicit knowledge is a matter of great controversy.