Processing Differences Across Regular and Irregular Inflections Revealed Through ERPs

Oculomotor and neural correlates of semantic and morphological priming in natural sentence reading

“…This approach allows us to rule out any orthographic (or phonological) contribution to morphological effects, which is why we adopted it. However, it may also justify the discrepancy between what we find here and what is reported in the ERP/RSVP paradigms (e.g., Lavric et al, 2010; Smolka et al, 2015; Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2002; Rastle et al, 2015), as well is in the individual word priming literature showing solid morphological facilitation (e.g., Marslen-Wilson et al, 1994; Feldman, 2000; Rastle et al,2000a; Gonnerman et al, 2007).…”

“…Some studies observed an N400 modulation with regular, but not irregular verbs (e.g., Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2002), while others did not find this regularity effect (Justus et al, 2011, in an auditory priming paradigm). Other studies observed the biphasic N250/N400 modulation using masked priming, but only with regular verbs (e.g., Rastle et al, 2015), while others, again, observed the same pattern of results with both regular and irregular verbs (Morris and Stockall, 2012).…”

“…These eye movement results nicely complement previous eye tracking experiments (e.g., Paterson et al, 2011)-when semantics and morphology are manipulated independently like in this experiment, the latter does not seem to give rise to cross-word processing savings during sentence reading. FRP components, instead, suggest that in natural reading, sharing an abstract morphological inflection, at least when denoted by distinct orthographic realizations, does not modulate any of the components traditionally linked with morphological processing, such as N250 and N400, as observed in ERP/RSVP paradigms (e.g., Lavric et al, 2010;Smolka et al, 2015;Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2002;Rastle et al, 2015).…”