Analogical effects in regular past tense production in Dutch

This study addresses the question to what extent the production of regular past tense forms in Dutch is affected by analogical processes. We report an experiment in which native speakers of Dutch listened to existing regular verbs over headphones, and had to indicate which of the past tense allomorphs, te or de, was appropriate for these verbs. According to generative analyses, the choice between the two suffixes is completely regular and governed by the underlying [voice]-specification of the stem-final segment. In this approach, no analogical effects are expected. In connectionist and analogical approaches, by contrast, the phonological similarity structure in the lexicon is expected to affect lexical processing. Our experimental results support the latter approach: all participants created more nonstandard past tense forms, produced more inconsistency errors, and responded more slowly for verbs with stronger analogical support for the nonstandard form.