Producing morphologically complex words: An ERP study with children and adults

Abstract

A widely studied morphological phenomenon in psycholinguistic research is the plurals-inside-compounds effect in English, which is the avoidance of regular plural modifiers within compounds (e.g., *rats hunter). The current study employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the production of plurals-inside-compounds in children and adults. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing morphologically complex words in 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds and adults, by recording ERPs during the silent production of compounds with plural or singular modifiers. Results for both children and adults revealed a negativity in response to compounds produced from regular plural forms when compared to compounds formed from irregular plurals, indicating a highly specific brain response to a subtle linguistic contrast. Although children performed behaviourally with an adult-like pattern in the task, we found a broader distribution and a considerably later latency in children's brain potentials than in adults', indicating that even in late childhood the brain networks involved in language processing are subject to subtle developmental changes.

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

“…The negativity of interest has been reported in four previous studies [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ] which all showed a frontally distributed effect. Visual inspection of the data confirmed a similar distribution in the present study.…”

“…We note that the account proposed here for the negativity obtained for analytic comparatives also applies to the results of production studies that tested other phenomena of morphological encoding. Recall that Budd et al (2013) [ 21 ] and Festman and Clahsen (2016) [ 22 ] obtained this enhanced negativity for the production of regular past tense forms, Jessen et al (2016) [ 24 ] for regular participles in German, and Budd et al (2015) [ 23 ] for regular plurals inside compounds in English. What is common to the phenomena that elicited this negativity is that they involve grammatically-based computational processes that have to be prevented from over-application.…”

“…By time-locking the EEG to the silent production stage, this design provides insight into planning the production of morphologically complex words prior to overt articulation. Four previous ERP studies used a silent production-plus-delayed-vocalization-task to examine different kinds of morphological phenomena: regular and irregular past-tense forms in English [ 21 – 22 ], regular and irregular plural forms in English compounds [ 23 ] (Budd et al, 2015), and regular and irregular past-participle forms in German [ 24 ]. These studies yielded consistent results: an enhanced negativity most often particularly pronounced at right frontal electrode-sites elicited during the (silent) production of regular (relative to irregular) word forms in a similar time window (i.e., between 300 to 450ms).…”

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

“…Items were presented on a 15-inch computer screen using Presentation (version 14.9 07.09.11), positioned approximately 100cm apart from participants. All other procedures followed the same as in Budd et al (2013Budd et al ( , 2015 and Jessen et al (2017). Each trial began with a fixation cross at the centre of the screen presented for 100ms, followed by the infinitive/stem form (e.g., to walk/…sag…) presented in Comic Sans font (96-point) in black on a white background, lasting 1,000ms.…”

“…This technique provides two sets of data: (i) children's (delayed) overt spoken output of a targeted morphologically complex word form, and (ii) the corresponding ERPtime-locked to a silent production cueto allow insights into the encoding and planning of this word form prior to overt articulation. Using this paradigm, Budd et al (2013) examined past tense formation in English, Budd et al (2015) plural forms in English compounds, and Jessen et al (2017) past participle formation in German. These studies tested seven-to thirteen-year-old children (and adults) and yielded consistent results.…”