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Time-Course in the Morphological Processing of Irregular Nominal Stems and Phi-Features in French
Poster Session B, Friday, October 25, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
Abstract: A consistent amount of evidence from research in language processing has shown that morphologically complex words are decomposed for lexical access and word recognition. In Romance languages, nominal inflection is typically characterized by the suffixes of gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural) (den Dikken, 2011). Then, it has been proposed that the activation of the of the morphosyntactic features from the inflectional morphemes is a necessary step for the full lexical access during word recognition (de Vega et al., 2010). Therefore, the two objectives of the present work were: i. Investigate the behavioral and ERP differences in the processing of gender and number suffixes in irregular nominal stems, and ii. track the EEG time-course in the processing of irregular nominal stems, exploring the single word processing without any kind of phonological, morphological, or semantic violations. Our hypothesis were i. differences in N400 or P600 related to gender and number morpheme processing, and differences in P2 and/or ELAN related to stem irregularity processing. For this purpose, twenty speakers of French as native language performed a lexical decision task on visual modality coupled with EEG. The experimental stimuli were manipulated in function of the type of nominal stem irregularity, and inflectional suffixes of gender and number as dependent variables: a. type (ami[0/e][0/s], locut[eur/euse][0/s], abrasi<f/ve>[0/s], nation<al/aux/ale/ales>), b. gender (MASC-FEM: ami[0]-ami[e]; locut[eur]-locut[euse]; abrasi<f>-abrasi<ve>; nation[aux]-nation[ales]), c. number (SING-PLUR: nation[al]-nation[aux]; nation[ale]-nation[ales]). All stimuli were controlled by means of frequency, length in number of letters and number of syllables, and phonological and orthographic neighborhood. As expected, the behavioral results presented a significant main difference of number and frequency, suggesting differences between singular and plural words, as well as between high and low frequency words .The EEG event-related potentials (ERP) yielded a significant difference in the N400 related to number inflection; plural words presented a N400 with greater amplitude and more left and anterior activation than singular words, suggesting the activation of specialized areas in the processing of the plural morphosyntactic feature. Also, the results showed a significant difference in gender processing in the ELAN and P600; both components presented greater amplitude and more left lateralized activations in the processing of the feminine morphosyntactic feature, reflecting specificity in the activation and integration of the gender suffix. These results suggest morphological decomposition in nominal inflection: first, the inflectional suffixes are decomposed; second, these functional morphemes activate the morphosyntactic features; third, the morphemes are recombined for lexical access (Fruchter & Marantz, 2015). Keywords: Morphological Processing; Irregular Stem; Phi-Features; Electroencephalography (EEG). References: de Vega, M., Urrutia, M., & Dominguez, A. (2010). Tracking lexical and syntactic processes of verb morphology with ERP. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 23(4), 400–415. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.03.003. den Dikken, M. (2011). Phi-feature inflection and agreement: An introduction. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 29(4), 857–874. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9156-y. Fruchter, J., & Marantz, A. (2015). Decomposition, lookup, and recombination: MEG evidence for the Full Decomposition model of complex visual word recognition. Brain and Language, 143, 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2015.03.001.
Topic Areas: Morphology, Reading