The brain makes a distinction between hard and easy stimuli: comments on Beretta et al.
The Beretta et al. study tested an invalid prediction concerning connectionist models of inflectional morphology and the study exhibits a confound between type of stimulus (regular, irregular) and processing difficulty (easy, hard) that invalidates their conclusions. Harder stimuli produced greater activation across a broader range of brain areas, as in previous studies, but the data have no bearing on the rules vs. connections debate.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 W Johnson St, Madison, WI 53706, USA. marks@lcnl.wisc.edu
Mark S
MS
Seidenberg
Aimee
A
Arnoldussen
D001921:Brain / Q000098:blood supply*; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary