CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 508Neurobiology of Language and BilingualismLanguage Development and DisordersReading and Literacy Development

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 129 of the 129 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Declarative/Procedural Model of Lexicon and Grammar

Ullman, Michael T.·2001·Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
DOI 10.1023/a:1005204207369
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Our use of language depends upon two capacities: a mental lexicon of memorized words and a mental grammar of rules that underlie the sequential and hierarchical composition of lexical forms into predictably structured larger words, phrases, and sentences. The declarative/procedural model posits that the lexicon/grammar distinction in language is tied to the distinction between two well-studied brain memory systems. On this view, the memorization and use of at least simple words (those with noncompositional, that is, arbitrary form-meaning pairings) depends upon an associative memory of distributed representations that is subserved by temporal-lobe circuits previously implicated in the learning and use of fact and event knowledge. This "declarative memory" system appears to be specialized for learning arbitrarily related information (i.e., for associative binding). In contrast, the acquisition and use of grammatical rules that underlie symbol manipulation is subserved by frontal/basal-ganglia circuits previously implicated in the implicit (nonconscious) learning and expression of motor and cognitive "skills" and "habits" (e.g., from simple motor acts to skilled game playing). This "procedural" system may be specialized for computing sequences. This novel view of lexicon and grammar offers an alternative to the two main competing theoretical frameworks. It shares the perspective of traditional dual-mechanism theories in positing that the mental lexicon and a symbol-manipulating…

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1023/a:1005204207369

Cites

129 of 129 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 122 references

Research works printed but not linked: 23

  1. Beatty, W. W., Zavadil, K. D., Bailly, R. C., Rixen, G. J., Zavadil, L. E., Farnham, N., & Fisher, L. (1988). Preserved musical skill in a severely demented patient. International Journal of Clinical Neuropsychology, 10(4), 158-164.
  2. Bromberg, H., Ullman, M. T., Coppola, M., Marcus, G., Kelly, K., & Levine, K. (1994). A dissociation of memory and grammar: Evidence from Williams Syndrome. 18th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, Massachusetts.
  3. Cottrell, G. W., & Plunkett, K. (1991). Learning the past tense in a recurrent Network: Acquiring the mapping from meaning to sounds, Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 328-333). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  4. De Renzi, E. (1989). Apraxia. In F. Boller & J. Grafman (Eds.), Handbook of Neuropsychology (Vol. 2, pp. 245-263). New York: Elsevier.
  5. Fodor, J. A. (1983). The modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. · DOI · Paper page
  6. Fujiwara, M., & Ullman, M. T. (1999). The computation of default suffixation in Japanese adjectival past tense formation. Paper presented at the 12th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, CUNY, New York.
  7. Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding aphasia. San Diego, California: Academic Press.
  8. MacWhinney, B., & Bates, E. (Eds.). (1989). The cross-linguistic study of sentence processing. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  9. Mishkin, M., Malamut, B., & Bachevalier, J. (1984). Memories and habits: Two neural systems. In G. Lynch & J. L. McGaugh & N. W. Weinburger (Eds.), Neurobiology of learning and memory (pp. 65-77). New York: Guilford Press.
  10. Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1981). Computer science as empirical inquiry: Symbol and search. In J. Haugeland (Ed.), Mind design: Philosophy psychology artificial intelligence (pp. 35-66). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  11. Newman, A., Izvorski, R., Davis, L., Neville, H., & Ullman, M. T. (1999). Distinct electrophysiological patterns in the processing of regular and irregular verbs. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Supplement, 47.
  12. Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1991). Regular and irregular morphology and the psychological status of rules of grammar. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 17, 230-251.
  13. Rhee, J., Pinker, S., & Ullman, M. T. (1999). A magnetoencephalographic study of English past tense production. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Supplement.
  14. Schacter, D. L., & Tulving, E. (Eds.). (1994). Memory systems 1994. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
  15. Seidenberg, M. S., & Daugherty, K. G. (1992). The psychological reality of grammatical rules: Linguistic, historical, chronometric, psychophysical, computational, developmental, neurological, and genetic evidence-NOT!!!. Paper presented at the Reality of Linguistic Rules Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
  16. Ullman, M. T. (in press). Evidence that lexical memory is part of the temporal lobe declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the frontal/basal-ganglia procedural system. Brain and Language.
  17. Ullman, M. T., Bergida, R., & O'Craven, K. (1997). Distinct fMRI activation patterns for regular and irregular past tense. NeuroImage, 5, S549.
  18. Ullman, M. T., Corkin, S., Pinker, S., Coppola, M., Locascio, J., & Growdon, J. H. (1993). Neural modularity in language: Evidence from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 19, 1806.
  19. Ullman, M. T., & Gopnik, M. (1994). Inflectional morphology in familial language impair-ment. Paper presented at the 19th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, Massachusetts.
  20. Ullman, M. T., Hickok, G., & Pinker, S. (1995). Irregular and regular inflectional morphology in an aphasic. Brain and Cognition, 28, 88-89.
  21. van der Lely, H. K. J., & Ullman, M. T. (in press). Past tense morphology in specifically language impaired and normally developing children. Language and Cognitive Processes.
  22. Young, A. B., & Penney, J. B. (1993). Biochemical and functional organization of the basal ganglia. In J. Jankovic & E. Tolosa (Eds.), Parkinson's disease and movement disorders, 2nd ed, (pp. 1-11). Baltimore, Maryland: Williams & Wilkins.
  23. Zola, S. (1997). Amnesia: neuroanatomic and clinical aspects. In T. E. Feinberg & M. J. Farah (Eds.), Neurology and neuropsychology (pp. 447-461). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 508

Related

Metadata

Authors
Ullman, M. T.
Affiliations
Georgetown University (US)
Corresponding author
Ullman, Michael T.
ORCID
Ullman, Michael T.
Venue
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2001-01
Volume
30
Issue
1
Pages
37-69
ISSN
  • 0090-6905 (ISSN-L)
  • 1573-6555
DOI
10.1023/a:1005204207369
OpenAlex
W1498096105
Cited by
508
References
122
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 37 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 32 · 2018: 22 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 25 · 2015: 32 · 2014: 25 · 2013: 40 · 2012: 30
FWCI
0.60
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
Locations
  • Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
National Institute of Mental Health (MH-58189, R01MH058189)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
Keywords
procedural memory, mental lexicon, mental grammar, associative memory, temporal lobe, frontal cortex, basal ganglia, morphological complexity, morphological productivity, double dissociation, implicit learning, symbolic computation, language acquisition, computational models of language, grammar learning
MeSH terms
Aphasia, Brain, Brain Diseases, Electroencephalography, Frontal Lobe, Humans, Linguistics, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Memory, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Tomography, Emission-Computed, Vocabulary, Magnetoencephalography

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review