Brain potentials to morphologically complex words during listening

Lück, Monika; Hahne, Anja; Clahsen, Harald

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.01.030

Cited by 46 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The similarity between the topography of the word pattern MMN and its time course (250-350 msec) to those of the lateralized negativities in previous research (Lück et al, 2006;Weyerts et al, 1997) suggests that the parsing of a regularly inflected form into a stem and a suffix in Indo-European languages and the parsing of an Arabic word into a root and word pattern may be cognitively and neurophysiologically similar processes, although involving linearly combined morphemes in one case and nonlinearly combined morphemes in another. This is consistent with the cross-linguistic similarities in the grammatical functions subserved by these different morphemes, although the Arabic word pattern has the extra role of conveying information about the phonological structure of the surface form.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 59%

“…By contrast, the MMN response in the word pattern condition is strongly left lateralized and most pronounced in the recordings above the left peri-sylvian areas as shown in Figure 3. Left-lateralized processing has been reported for function words and grammatical morphemes based on normal subjectsʼ data and clinical data (e.g., Lück, Hanhne, & Clahsen, 2006;Shtyrov & Pulvermüller, 2002;Weyerts, Penke, Dohrn, Clahsen, & Müte, 1997;Caplan, 1992;Neville, Nicol, Barss, Forster, & Garrett, 1991;Geschwind, 1970). The present data extend the finding of strongly left-lateralized brain responses to the Arabic word pattern, which is a derivational morpheme.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this context, it is important to note that the differential laterality seen for different types of morpheme does not require the application of the MMN method. For example, ERP laterality differences between function and content words have been found in lexical decision tasks (Pulvermüller et al, 1995;Neville et al, 1992), whereas regular and irregular verbs can elicit left-lateralized (e.g., LAN) versus symmetric (N400) effects (Lück et al, 2006;Friederici, 2002;Weyerts et al, 1997).…”

Section: Do Roots and Patterns Have Specific Neural Signatures?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Arabic Morphology in the Neural Language System

Boudelaa

Pulvermüller²,

Hauk³

et al. 2010

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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There are two views about morphology, the aspect of language concerned with the internal structure of words. One view holds that morphology is a domain of knowledge with a specific type of neurocognitive representation supported by specific brain mechanisms lateralized to left fronto-temporal cortex. The alternate view characterizes morphological effects as being a by-product of the correlation between form and meaning and where no brain area is predicted to subserve morphological processing per se. Here we provided evidence from Arabic that morphemes do have specific memory traces, which differ as a function of their functional properties. In an MMN study, we showed that the abstract consonantal root, which conveys semantic meaning (similarly to monomorphemic content words in English), elicits an MMN starting from 160 msec after the deviation point, whereas the abstract vocalic word pattern, which plays a range of grammatical roles, elicits an MMN response starting from 250 msec after the deviation point. Topographically, the root MMN has a symmetric fronto-central distribution, whereas the word pattern MMN lateralizes significantly to the left, indicating stronger involvement of left peri-sylvian areas. In languages with rich morphologies, morphemic processing seems to be supported by distinct neural networks, thereby providing evidence for a specific neuronal basis for morphology as part of the cerebral language machinery.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Do Roots and Patterns Have Specific Neural Signatures?mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Arabic Morphology in the Neural Language System

Boudelaa

Pulvermüller²,

Hauk³

et al. 2010

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…LAN effects were seen for various types of morphosyntactic anomalies, including disagreement of subject-verb relations and tense inflection (e. Brown, 2003;Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000;Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998;Münte, Heinze, & Mangun, 1993;Rösler, Putz, Friederici, & Hahne, 1993;Neville, Nicol, Barss, Forster, & Garrettdew, 1991;Kutas & Hillyard, 1983). LANs have also been elicited by morphological anomalies, comprising violations of morphological structure (Lück, Hahne, & Clahsen, 2006;Rodriguez-Fornells, Clahsen, Lleo, Zaake, & Münte, 2001;Gross, Say, Kleingers, Clahsen, & Münte, 1998;Penke et al, 1997;Weyerts, Penke, Dohrn, Clahsen, & Munte, 1997;Friederici, Pfeifer, & Hahne, 1993). For overregularization of regular inflection to irregular nouns (e.g., *Pantoffel-s vs. Pantoffel-n), Weyerts and colleagues (1997) reported an enhanced LAN, whereas no such ERP effect was seen for irregularization of regular nouns (e.g., *Trick-en vs. Trick-s).…”

Section: Erpsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Past Tense Debate Revisited: Electrophysiological Evidence for Subregularities of Irregular Verb Inflection

Regel

Opitz

Müller

et al. 2015

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Neuropsychological research investigating mental grammar and lexicon has largely been based on the processing of regular and irregular inflection. Past tense inflection of regular verbs is assumed to be generated by a syntactic rule (e.g., show-ed), whereas irregular verbs consist of rather unsystematic alternations (e.g., caught) represented as lexical entries. Recent morphological accounts, however, hold that irregular inflection is not entirely rule-free but relies on morphological principles. These subregularities are computed by the syntactic system. We tested this latter hypothesis by examining alternations of irregular German verbs as well as pseudowords using ERPs. Participants read series of irregular verb inflection including present tense, past participle, and past tense forms embedded in minimal syntactic contexts. The critical past tense form was correct (e.g., er sang [he sang]) or incorrect by being either partially consistent (e.g., *er sung [*he sung]) or inconsistent (e.g., *er sing [*he sing]) with the proposed morphological principles. Correspondingly, in a second experimental block, pseudowords (e.g., tang/*tung/*ting) were presented. ERPs for real words revealed a biphasic ERP pattern consisting of a negativity and P600 for both incorrect forms in comparison to the correct equivalents. Most interestingly, the P600 amplitude for the incorrect forms was gradually modulated by the type of anomaly with medium amplitude for consistent past tense forms and largest amplitude for inconsistent past tense forms. ERPs for pseudoword past tense forms showed a similar gradual modulation of N400. The findings support the assumption that irregular verbs are processed by rule-based mechanisms because of subregularities of their past tense inflection.

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“…Within the context of the debate on regular versus irregular morphology (for a discussion, see Pinker & Ullman, 2002;McClelland & Patterson, 2002) Gross, Say, Kleingers, Clahsen, & Mü nte, 1998). By contrast, the pattern of results for incorrect regular words is much more variable: whereas some experiments showed N400 differences for violations of regular forms (Lü ck et al, 2006;Weyerts et al, 1997), others did not reveal any negativity effects at all (Gross et al, 1998;Penke et al, 1997). Thus, one might draw a tentative analogy between these findings and the domain of subject-object ambiguities: in both cases, the ''regular" forms show a more variable component pattern than the exceptions.…”

Section: Monophasic Late Positivities In Grammatical Function Reanalysesmentioning

confidence: 99%