Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features

Error-Related Activity and Correlates of Grammatical Plasticity

“…Although both types of incorrect prepositional phrases violate the syntactic rule according to which case, number, and gender features must be specified on the first (and only on the first) inflectable element of the noun phrase, the neural violation response thus seems to hinge on the presence of (incorrect) positively specified syntactic features. Hierarchical feature specification analyses of the German adjective paradigm predict a differential response to strong forms positively specifying syntactic features and weak default forms and hence are supported by our data (see Clahsen et al, 2001; Penke et al, 2004 for corresponding psycholinguistic evidence).…”

“…By contrast, if the adjective is preceded by a definite determiner that expresses the feature information, the adjective has a suffix from the weak declension paradigm that is compatible with the feature specification of the determiner but does not express the features itself [“mit dem [+ Dat , − F , − Pl ] kleinen [] Kind [− F , − M ] ” (also “with the small child”)]. According to previous linguistic analyses of German adjective declension the weak − en suffix can be seen as a default or “elsewhere” form (Bierwisch, 1967; Zwicky, 1986; Blevins, 1995, 2003; Cahill and Gazdar, 1997; Wunderlich, 1997; Schlenker, 1999; Clahsen et al, 2001; Penke et al, 2004). For our stimuli, we used a subset of the full German paradigm involving dative case singular noun phrases, in order to restrict the learning problem.…”

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

“…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.…”

Defective adjectival inflection in non-native German: Prosodic transfer or missing surface inflection?

“…This can be illustrated in Table 5 which shows the possible feature specifications of number, gender, Case and context, for the insertion of adjectival inflection in German (using the three Cases under investigation in this study). Table 5 could represent the feature specifications of a native speaker, (although it is commonly accepted that neuter is the default gender (Penke et al 2004) and would thus appear as unmarked or unspecified; and further that nominative is the default Case in German (Schütze 1997) and would be equally unspecified); however a learner of German may not have all features fully specified (Hawkins et al 2006), and it is in these cases that competition between two (or more) lexical items occurs, where the least specified item 'wins' and is then inserted.…”