Cover not available
Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 13:2 (2018) ► pp.186–214

Variability and consistency in late bilinguals’ morphology

An ERP production study

| University of Potsdam
| University of Potsdam
| University of Potsdam
Speaking a late-learned second language (L2) is supposed to yield more variable and less consistent output than speaking one’s first language (L1), particularly with respect to reliably adhering to grammatical morphology. The current study investigates both internal processes involved in encoding morphologically complex words – by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during participants’ silent productions – and the corresponding overt output. We specifically examined compounds with plural or singular modifiers in English. Thirty-one advanced L2 speakers of English (L1: German) were compared to a control group of 20 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found an enhanced (right-frontal) negativity during (silent) morphological encoding for compounds produced from regular plural forms relative to compounds formed from irregular plurals, replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. The L2 speakers’ overt productions, however, were significantly less consistent than those of the L1 speakers on the same task. We suggest that L2 speakers employ the same mechanisms for morphological encoding as L1 speakers, but with less reliance on grammatical constraints than L1 speakers.
Keywords: event-related potentials (ERP), plurals in compounds, morphological constraints, harmonic grammars, morphological processing
Article outline
  • Constraints on plurals in compounds
  • Psycholinguistic studies on plurals inside compounds
  • The present study
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Procedure
    • EEG recording and data analysis
  • Results
    • Behavioural responses
    • ERP data
  • Discussion
    • Morphological encoding in L1 and L2 speakers
    • Variability in L2 production
    • A three-way contrast: Children, adult natives, and late-learners
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.18002.jes
References (56)
References
Alegre, M. A., & Gordon, P. (1996). Red rats eater exposes recursion in children’s word formation. Cognition, 601, 65–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Allan, D. (2004). Oxford Placement Test 2: Test Pack. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX lexical data base on CD-ROM.Google Scholar
Barr, D. J. (2013). Random effects structure for testing interactions in linear mixed-effects models. Frontiers in Psychology 4, 328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 671, 1–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berent, I., & Pinker, S. (2007). The dislike of regular plurals in compounds: Phonological familiarity or morphological constraint? The Mental Lexicon, 21, 129–181. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blakemore, S.-J. (2012). Imaging brain development: the adolescent brain. Neuroimage, 611, 397–406. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borer, H. (1988). On the morphological parallelism between compounds and constructs. In G. Booji & J. van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of Morphology, 11 (pp. 45–65). Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Budd, M.-J., Paulmann, S., Barry, C., & Clahsen, H. (2013). Brain potentials during language production in children and adults: An ERP study of the English past tense. Brain and Language, 1271, 345–355. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015). Producing morphologically complex words: An ERP study with children and adults. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 121, 51–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Casey, B., Tottenham, N., Liston, C., & Durston, S. (2005). Imaging the developing brain: what have we learned about cognitive development? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 91, 104–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: A multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 221, 991–1013. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006). Dual-mechanism morphology. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Vol. 41, pp 1–5). Oxford: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2008). Behavioral methods for investigating morphological and syntactic processing in children. In I. Sekerina, E. Fernández, & H. Clahsen, (Eds.), Developmental psycholinguistics: On-line methods in children’s language processing (pp. 1–27). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Gerth, S., Heyer, V., & Schott, E. (2015). Morphology constrains native and non-native word formation in different ways: Evidence from plurals inside compounds. The Mental Lexicon, 101, 53–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Reifegerste, J. (2017). Morphological processing in old-age bilinguals. In M. Libben, T. Gollan, & G. Libben (Eds.), Bilingualism: A framework for understanding the mental lexicon (pp. 217–247). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Council of Europe. Council for Cultural Co-operation. Education Committee. Modern Languages Division (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: learning, teaching, assessment. Cambrige, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cunnings, I., & Clahsen, H. (2007). The time-course of morphological constraints: Evidence from eye-movements during reading. Cognition, 1041, 476–494. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Di Sciullo, A.-M., & Williams, E. (1987). On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Festman, J., & Clahsen, H. (2016). How Germans prepare for the English past tense: Silent production of inflected words during EEG. Applied Psycholinguistics, 371, 487–506. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
García Mayo, M. P. (2006). Synthetic compounding in the English interlanguage of Basque–Spanish bilinguals. International Journal of Multilingualism, 31, 231–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldrick, M., Putnam, M., & Schwarz, L. (2016). Coactivation in bilingual grammars: A computational account of code mixing. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, 191, 857–876. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gordon, P. (1985). Level-ordering in lexical development. Cognition, 211, 73–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haskell, T. R., MacDonald, M. C., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2003). Language learning and innateness: Some implications of compounds research. Cognitive Psychology, 471, 119–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holm, S. (1979). A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 61, 65–70. Stable URL: [URL]
Hopp, H. (2010). Ultimate attainment in L2 inflection: Performance similarities between non-native and native speakers. Lingua, 1201, 901–931. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2013). Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability. Second Language Research, 291, 33–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Indefrey, P. (2011). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components: A critical update. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 255. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Indefrey, P., & Levelt, W. J. (2004). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components. Cognition, 921, 101–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ionin, T., & Wexler, K. (2002). Why is ‘is’ easier than ‘-s’?: Acquisition of tense/agreement morphology by child second language learners of English. Second Language Research, 181, 95–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaensch, C., Heyer, V., Gordon, P., & Clahsen, H. (2014). What plurals and compounds reveal about constraints in word formation. Language Acquisition, 211, 319–338. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Janssen, D. P., Roelofs, A., & Levelt, W. J. (2002). Inflectional frames in language production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 171, 209–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kappenman, E. S., & Luck, S. (2010). The effects of electrode impedance on data quality and statistical significance in ERP recordings. Psychopshysiology 471, 888–904. Google Scholar
Kiparsky, P. (1982). From cyclic phonology to lexical phonology. In H. van der Hulst & N. Smith (Eds.), The structure of phonological representations, Part 1 (pp. 131–75). Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Koester, D., & Schiller, N. O. (2008). Morphological priming in overt language production: Electrophysiological evidence from Dutch. Neuroimage, 421, 1622–1630. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lardiere, D. (1995). L2 acquisition of English synthetic compounding is not constrained by level-ordering (and neither, probably, is L1). Second Language Research, 111, 20–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lawrence, M. (2016). ez: Easy analysis and visualization of factorial experiments. R package version 4.2. [URL]Google Scholar
Legendre, G., Miyata, Y., & Smolensky, P. (1990). Harmonic grammar – A formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguistic well-formedness: Theoretical foundations. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, (pp. 388–395). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 221, 1–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murphy, V. A. (2000). Compounding and the representation of L2 inflectional morphology. Language Learning, 501, 153–197. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oyang, G., Sommer, W., Zhou, C., Aristei, S., Pinkpank, T., & Rahman, R. A. (2016). Articulation artefacts during overt language production in Event-Related Brain Potentials: Description and correction. Brain topography, 291, 791–813. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pater, J. (2009). Weighted constraints in generative linguistics. Cognitive Science, 331, 999–1035. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S., & Ullman, M. T. (2002). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 61, 456–463. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prado, E. L., & Ullman, M. T. (2009): Can imageability help us draw the line between storage and composition? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 351, 849–866. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Core Team (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL [URL]
Ramscar, M., & Dye, M. (2011). Learning language from the input: Why innate constraints can’t explain noun compounding. Cognitive Psychology, 621, 1–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Runnqvist, E., Strijkers, K., Sadat, J., & Costa, A. (2011). On the temporal and functional origin of L2 disadvantages in speech production: A critical review. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 379. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sahin, N. T., Pinker, S., Cash, S. S., Schomer, D., & Halgren, E. (2009). Sequential processing of lexical, grammatical, and phonological information within Broca’s area. Science, 3261, 445–449. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S., MacDonald, M. C., & Haskell, T. R. (2007). Semantics and phonology constrain compound formation. The Mental Lexicon, 21, 287–312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva, R., Gerth, S., & Clahsen, H. (2013). Morphological constraints in children’s spoken language comprehension: A visual world study of plurals inside compounds in English. Cognition, 1291, 457–469. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smolensky, P., Goldrick, M., & Mathis, D. (2014). Optimization and quantization in gradient symbol systems: A framework for integrating the continuous and the discrete in cognition. Cognitive Science, 381, 1102–1138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sonnenstuhl, I. & Huth, A. (2002). Processing and representation of German n-plurals. A dual mechanism approach. Brain & Language, 811, 276–290. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Veríssimo, J. (2016). Extending a Gradient Symbolic approach to the native versus non-native contrast: The case of plurals in compounds. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, 191, 900–902. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
White, L. (2002). Morphological variability in endstate L2 grammars: The question of L1 influence. In A. Do, S. Fish, & B. Skarabela (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 758–768). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
(2003). Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Royle, Phaedra & Karsten Steinhauer
2023. Neural Correlates of Morphology Computation and Representation. In Language Electrified [Neuromethods, 202], ► pp. 447 ff. DOI logo
Lorenz, Antje, Pienie Zwitserlood, Audrey Bürki, Stefanie Regel, Guang Ouyang & Rasha Abdel Rahman
2021. Morphological facilitation and semantic interference in compound production: An ERP study. Cognition 209 ► pp. 104518 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.