Morphological paradigms in language processing and language disorders

Abstract

We present results from two cross-modal morphological priming experiments investigating regular person and number inflection on finite verbs in German. We found asymmetries in the priming patterns between different affixes that can be predicted from the structure of the paradigm. We also report data from language disorders which indicate that inflectional errors produced by language-impaired adults and children tend to occur within a given paradigm dimension, rather than randomly across the paradigm. We conclude that morphological paradigms are used by the human language processor and can be systematically affected in language disorders.

An Event-related Potential Study on Changes of Violation and Error Responses during Morphosyntactic Learning

“…Although this assumption allows for an elegant description of highly syncretic inflectional paradigms, there is, to date, only some psycholinguistic evidence for processing differences between adjective forms with different feature specifications. Behavioral data by Clahsen et al (2001) have shown longer lexical decision times for adjective forms specified for more features and a dependency of the size of cross-modal priming effects on feature overlap between prime and target adjective forms. Penke et al (2004) found behavioral violation effects for incorrectly specified determiners and adjectives only when the incorrect inflectional affixes signaled positive, nonmatching feature values (e.g., adjective plus -m or -r in a context specifying either accusative masculine singular, dative feminine singular, or genitive plural).…”

“…German adjective forms show a high degree of syncretism with only five different suffixes expressing the 72 possible combinations of case, gender, number, and declension class. Linguistic analyses (Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl, Hadler, & Eisenbeiss, 2001;Schlenker, 1999;Cahill & Gazdar, 1997;Wunderlich, 1997;Blevins, 1995;Zwicky, 1986;Bierwisch, 1967) have dealt with the syncretism by using a hierarchical feature specification, such that some suffixes are specified for case, number, and gender features and others are treated as default or ''elsewhere'' forms with reduced or no specification (see also Penke, Janssen, & Eisenbeiss, 2004). We investigated whether the feature specification of adjective forms would modulate electrophysiological declension class violation responses by separately analyzing declension class violations involving incorrect strong adjective forms having rich feature specifications and incorrect weak adjective forms having poor feature specifications.…”

The simultaneous effects of inflectional paradigms and classes on lexical recognition: Evidence from Serbian

“…Taft (1979) and Colé, Beauvillain, and Segui (1989) report that the summed frequency of all the inflected variants of a word -its stem frequency -co-determines the response latencies to suffixed words in visual lexical decision experiments. On the other hand, some authors have directly investigated the role of IPs in the processing of inflectionally rich languages (for German : Clahsen, 1999;Clahsen, Hadler, Eisenbeiss, & Sonnenstuhl-Henning, 2001;Janssen & Penke, 2002;for Finnish: Bertram, Laine, Baayen, Schreuder, & Hyönä, 2000;Hyönä, Laine, & Niemi, 1995; for Italian: Burani, Salmaso, & Caramazza, 1984;Caramazza, Laudanna, & Romani, 1988; for Serbian: A. Kostić, 1991Kostić, , 1995Lukatela, Gligorijević, Kostić, & Turvey, 1980).…”

“…On the one hand, some of them have presented evidence for the IP of a particular word playing a role (e.g., Baayen et al, 2006;Clahsen et al, 2001;Janssen & Penke, 2002;Moscoso del Prado Martín et al, 2004;Colombo & Burani, 2002), but have neglected the role of the more general IC. On the other hand, another group of studies (A.…”

The evolution of case systems for marking event structure

“…This claim can be empirically validated through psycho-and neurolinguistic experiments. First work in these disciplines indeed seems to confirm the positive effect of case on processing (Clahsen et al, 2001). The same hypothesis has also yielded interesting results using mathematical models (Jäger, 2007).…”