Morphological aspects of human language processing have been suggested by some to be reducible to the combination of orthographic and semantic effects, while others propose that morphological structure is represented separately from semantics and orthography and involves distinct neuro-cognitive processing mechanisms. Here we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate semantic, morphological and formal (orthographic) processing conjointly in a masked priming paradigm. We directly compared morphological to both semantic and formal/orthographic priming (shared letters) on verbs. Masked priming was used to reduce strategic effects related to prime perception and to suppress semantic priming effects. The three types of priming led to distinct ERP and behavioral patterns: semantic priming was not found, while formal and morphological priming resulted in diverging ERP patterns. These results are consistent with models of lexical processing that make reference to morphological structure. We discuss how they fit in with the existing literature and how unresolved issues could be addressed in further studies.

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We studied the emergence of productive verb inflection in pre-school native speakers of Quebec French using a verb elicitation task. We verified whether verb conjugation group (regular vs. irregular morphology) and frequency affect ability to produce correctly inflected passé composé forms. Special attention was paid to regularization into regular (default) and sub-regular conjugations, and on irregularization patterns. Results indicate that French-speaking children are able to productively use inflectional rules at very young ages and are sensitive to verb frequency and morphological patterns, both default or sub-regular, as evidenced by differential production patterns for regular and irregular verbs.