Article published In:
The Mental LexiconVol. 4:3 (2009) ► pp.336–353
Derivational morphology approached with event-related potentials
Bernadette M. Jansma | Maastricht University, Faculty of Psychology, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, The Netherlands
We investigated the processing of derived adjectives in German using event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs were registered to existing adjectives (freundlich, ‘friendly’), to morphologically complex pseudowords that were synonymous to an existing adjective and thus interpretable (*freundhaft), and to complex pseudowords that were structurally and semantically anomalous (*freundbar). Stimuli were embedded in sentence contexts, displayed word by word. An ERP effect with a left-frontal maximum was observed around 450–500 ms after stimulus onset. In this window, both pseudoword types differed from existing adjectives. We interpret this data pattern as a LAN, reflecting structural problems due to morphological parsing, a process that is distinct from semantic processing.
Keywords: morphology, ERP, derivation, visual word recognition, semantics, German
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