Chapter 3 Literature Review

In this chapter, previous studies on the processing of regular and irregular forms will be reviewed. As mentioned in 1.1, the issue of the processing of regular and irregular forms has been explored in the fields of child first language acquisition, adult first language processing, first language disorders and second language acquisition. We shall see that most of the previous studies have been conducted in the first language field, focusing on frequency effects of the regular and irregular English verbs. Only in recent years have an increasing number of studies probed the German noun and adjective system and second language acquisition. And one point worth noting is that most studies so far have argued for the dual-mechanism models or the connectionist models, but almost no studies have argued for Generative Phonology.