1.4 Organization of the Dissertation

The dissertation consists of 8 chapters. This chapter serves as an introduction and the rest of the dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the theoretical models of the processing of regular and irregular forms, namely the single-mechanism models and the dual-mechanism models, as well as their diagnostic devices. Specifically, the Generative Phonology and the connectionist models of the single-mechanism approach as well as the Words and Rules model and the Declarative/Procedural model of the dual-mechanism approach are introduced in detail. The previous studies on the processing of regular and irregular forms are reviewed in Chapter 3 in the fields of child first language acquisition, adult first language processing, first language disorders and second language acquisition. Based on the theoretical models and previous studies, three experiments on the past tense forms of regular and irregular English verbs are designed and conducted: a past tense production task, a visual lexical decision task and a masked priming task. The methods and results of the three experiments are reported in Chapter 4, 5 and 6 respectively, each of which is followed by a short discussion. Chapter 7 offers a general discussion and responds to the research questions of the present study. Advantages of the dual-mechanism models and the problems with the current models are also explored. The last chapter summarizes the major findings, implications and limitations of this study, and discusses potential research in the future.