The brain is not single-minded about inflectional morphology: A response to the commentaries

Jaeger is supportive of our experiment and the claims we make, arguing that the weight of current evidence shows the brain making a distinction between regular and irregular inflectional morphology. Seidenberg & Arnoldussen are unsupportive, criticizing our work on theoretical and methodological grounds. Seidenberg & Amoldussen's major worries-that we have misunderstood connectionist theory's predictions and have committed a "Difficulty Matching Error" in testing them-are important to consider but turn out to be groundless. At bottom, Seidenberg & Arnoldussen fail to recognize the consequences of our choice of German words, rather than English, as stimuli. Once the concept of "difficulty" is given substance in this context, it appears that in German, the brain activates more extensively when dealing with what in the connectionist universe should be, if anything, the easier stimuli, not the harder ones as suggested by Seidenberg & Arnoldussen. Thus regularity cannot be reduced to difficulty. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.