Arguments concerning the relative role of semantic and grammatical factors in word formation have proven to be a wedge issue in current debates over the nature of linguistic representation and processing. In the present paper, we re-examine claims by Ramscar [Ramscar, M. (2002). The role of meaning in inflection: Why the past tense does not…

Experiments involving 121 college students in the Netherlands were based on the hypothesis that the difficulty of retrieving a lexical item for language production has at least 2 different sources. Experiments supported the distinction between a preverbal conceptual and a lexical level of representation in language production. (SLD)

In earlier work we have shown that adults, young children, and infants are capable of computing transitional probabilities among adjacent syllables in rapidly presented streams of speech, and of using these statistics to group adjacent syllables into word-like units. In the present experiments we ask whether adult learners are also capable of such…