An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection

Abstract

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs ("regulars") is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, "irregular" English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over midline parietal sites (P600s), and seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory.

Register affects language comprehension: ERP evidence from article omission in newspaper headlines

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Two Ways of Processing Language: Associative Memory and Computational Rules in the Case of Modern Polish

“…Although fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) (Ullman et al 1997;Huang et al 2002;Beretta et al 2003), ERP (Event-related potential) (Newman et al 2007) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) (Jaeger et al 1996;Indefrey et al 1997) studies have revealed that different cerebral regions are active during regular and irregular inflection processing and that irregular forms are processed relatively slower, a metaanalysis (Indefrey 2000) has shown that: What is more, the development o f irregular past tense verbs depends on their frequency (Shipley et al 1991). No such in-depth research has been conducted specifically for the Polish language so far.…”

A behavioral study to investigate the processing routes of grammatical gender in Brazilian Portuguese

“…For the English language, for instance, many studies (NEWMAN; ULLMAN, 2007;ULMMAN, 2001ULMMAN, , 2004ULMMAN, , 2005PRASADA;PINKER, 1993) have shown that the processing of high-frequency and low-frequency regular forms are not correlated with their frequencies, but that speakers of English process high-frequency irregular verbs faster than low-frequency irregular verbs. These findings suggest that speakers of English activate a computational mechanism to process regular forms (by concatenating a base to a suffix: walk + ed in language production or decomposing the items into their morphological constituents in language comprehension), but rely on memory to process irregular forms.…”