Decomposition of morphologically complex words in English: evidence from event-related brain potentials

Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: Evidence from event-related potentials

“…Fowler, Napps, & Feldman, 1985;Hanson & Wilkenfeld, 1985). N400 effects have been found to be reduced for regular, but not irregular verbs, using this design in German (Weyerts et al, 1996), English (Münte et al, 1999), and Spanish (Rodríguez-Fornells, Münte, & Clahsen, 2002). The rationale for the intervening items, and a potential explanation for the discrepant results in immediate and delayed-priming designs, is the reduction or elimination of semantic priming, which otherwise dominates the behavioral and N400 priming effects.…”

“…The debate has broader relevance for cognitive science, given that the dual-route model is associated with a propositional, symbol-manipulating view of cognition (Marcus, 2001), whereas the single-route model has been driven by the development of connectionism and neural-network modeling. For the neuropsychologist, the past-tense controversy is of interest given the important role that cognitive and neural dissociations have played in fueling the debate; dissociations between regular and irregular morphology have been observed in data from acquisition (Brown, 1973;Kuczaj, 1977), psycholinguistics (Stanners, Neiser, Hernon, & Hall, 1979;Kempley & Morton, 1982;Napps, 1989;Sonnenstuhl, Eisenbeiss, & Clahsen, 1999), neuropsychology (Ullman et al, 1997;Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1997;Tyler, de Mornay Davies, et al, 2002), neuroimaging (Jaeger et al, 1996;Beretta et al, 2003;Sahin, Pinker, & Halgren, 2006;de Diego Balaguer et al, 2006), and electrophysiology (Münte, Say, Clahsen, Schiltz, & Kutas, 1999;Weyerts, Münte, Smid, & Heinze, 1996). In fact, the past-tense debate is largely one of how to interpret cognitive and neural dissociations.…”

Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English

“…All subsequent experiments with native speakers have obtained priming effects for regularly inflected past-tense forms in English (see e.g. Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1998;Münte, Say, Clahsen, Schiltz and Kutas, 1999). Priming effects in native speakers of English have also been found for derived word forms (punishment → punish), particularly for productive and (phonologically and semantically) transparent ones, even though several studies that directly compared inflection and derivation in priming tasks found stronger priming effects for (regularly) inflected forms than for derivational ones (see Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl and Blevins (2003) for review).…”

Automatic Control of Simple Language in Web Pages

“…Affixation and derivation should result in a predictable outcome. Morphologically complex words, especially when they are infrequent, can impose a considerable burden to the human language processing system [20,19,1]. Composition* is a highly productive phenomenon in some languages (German is a notorious example).…”