Morphological encoding in German children's language production: evidence from event-related brain potentials

Abstract

This study reports developmental changes in morphological encoding across late childhood. We examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during the silent production of regularly vs. irregularly inflected verb forms (viz. -t vs. -n participles of German) in groups of eight- to ten-year-olds, eleven- to thirteen-year-olds, and adults. The adult data revealed an enhanced (right-frontal) negativity 300-450 ms after cue onset for the (silent) production of -t relative to -n past participle forms (e.g. geplant vs. gehauen 'planned' vs. 'hit'). For the eleven- to thirteen-year-olds, the same enhanced negativity was found, with a more posterior distribution and a longer duration (=300-550 ms). The eight- to ten-year-olds also showed this negativity, again with a posterior distribution, but with a considerably delayed onset (800-1,000 ms). We suggest that this negativity reflects combinatorial processing required for producing -t participles in both children and adults and that the spatial and temporal modulations of this ERP effect across the three participant groups are due to developmental changes of the brain networks involved in processing morphologically complex words.

Morphological encoding beyond slots and fillers: An ERP study of comparative formation in English

“…The negativity of interest has been reported in four previous studies [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ] which all showed a frontally distributed effect. Visual inspection of the data confirmed a similar distribution in the present study.…”

“…We thus focused our statistical analysis on frontal and midline electrode sites and included electrodes from left frontal (LF: F1, FC1, F3, FC3, F5, FC5), right frontal (RF: F2, FC2, F4, FC4, F6, FC6), and midline (ML: FZ, FCZ, FPZ) sites. Time windows of interest for mean amplitude quantification of the ERP data were also guided by these previous studies [ 21 , 22 – 24 ], although visual inspection revealed a longer lasting component in the present data set than previously observed. The time-window of interest was therefore extended to cover the full temporal breadth of the negativity; hence, we extracted mean ERP amplitudes between 300-800ms after stimulus onset.…”

“…By time-locking the EEG to the silent production stage, this design provides insight into planning the production of morphologically complex words prior to overt articulation. Four previous ERP studies used a silent production-plus-delayed-vocalization-task to examine different kinds of morphological phenomena: regular and irregular past-tense forms in English [ 21 – 22 ], regular and irregular plural forms in English compounds [ 23 ] (Budd et al, 2015), and regular and irregular past-participle forms in German [ 24 ]. These studies yielded consistent results: an enhanced negativity most often particularly pronounced at right frontal electrode-sites elicited during the (silent) production of regular (relative to irregular) word forms in a similar time window (i.e., between 300 to 450ms).…”

Do bilingual children lag behind? A study of morphological encoding using ERPs

“…For the older group of bilingual children, Figure 4 (right panel) shows a more negative-going waveform for the production of regular (weak) over irregular (strong) Note. *These data are from Jessen et al (2017).…”

Inflectional morphology in bilingual language processing: An age-of-acquisition study

“…Lengthy periods with occasional overregularization errors into late childhood have also been reported for the acquisition of other languages. For 8-13-year-old German children, for example, Jessen et al (2017) reportedt overregularization rates between 4% and 6% in their (elicited) production of irregular participle. In line with these findings from child language research, we interpret the observed discontinuity at an AoA of 11 years in our present data as reflecting an extended period of sensitivity for the development and stabilization of complex lexical entries with their irregular subentries and corresponding morphosyntactic features.…”