Morphological encoding beyond slots and fillers: An ERP study of comparative formation in English

Abstract

One important organizational property of morphology is competition. Different means of expression are in conflict with each other for encoding the same grammatical function. In the current study, we examined the nature of this control mechanism by testing the formation of comparative adjectives in English during language production. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during cued silent production, the first study of this kind for comparative adjective formation. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing synthetic relative to analytic comparatives, e.g. angrier vs. more angry. A frontal, bilaterally distributed, enhanced negative-going waveform for analytic comparatives (vis-a-vis synthetic ones) emerged approximately 300ms after the (silent) production cue. We argue that this ERP effect reflects a control mechanism that constrains grammatically-based computational processes (viz. more comparative formation). We also address the possibility that this particular ERP effect may belong to a family of previously observed negativities reflecting cognitive control monitoring, rather than morphological encoding processes per se.

Do bilingual children lag behind? A study of morphological encoding using ERPs

“…We replicated for bilingual children an ERP effect (viz. the Morphological Encoding Negativity) that was previously found for monolingual children and adults (Budd et al, 2013(Budd et al, , 2015Festman & Clahsen, 2016;Jessen et al, 2017;Clahsen et al, 2018). This ERP effect was found for different morphological systems (past tense / past participle inflection, plurals inside compounds, comparative adjective formation), in different languages (English, German), and for different populations, viz.…”

“…A model sketching how this may work for the production of English past tense forms is shown in Figure 7; see also Pinker and Ullman (2002) and Clahsen et al (2018).…”

“…Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the Morphological Encoding Negativity is reminiscent of fronto-central negativities occurring in similar time windows (∼300-800ms) which have been taken to reflect processes involved in conflict monitoring and cognitive control (e.g., Patel & Azzam, 2005;Folstein & Van Petten, 2008). It is therefore conceivable that this ERP effect is not specific to grammatical morphology (or language) but is instead part of a family of negativities that signal cognitive control processes more generally (see Clahsen et al, 2018).…”

“…The ERPs recorded during children's (silent) morphological encoding and planning of the (correctly inflected) past tense and past participle forms elicited a broadly distributed enhanced negativity for regular (relative to irregular) forms. This brain responselabelled the Morphological Encoding Negativityhas been taken to reflect a control mechanism for regular inflection (to prevent massive overapplication) that is not required for irregular forms; see Clahsen, Budd, Paulmann, and Barry (2018).…”