Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-swr86 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T18:04:36.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How Germans prepare for the English past tense: Silent production of inflected words during EEG

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2015

JULIA FESTMAN  and
HARALD CLAHSEN
JULIA FESTMAN
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam, Germany
HARALD CLAHSEN*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam, Germany
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Harald Clahsen, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam, Haus 2, Campus Golm, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany. E-mail: harald.clahsen@uni-potsdam.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Processes involved in late bilinguals’ production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants’ silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 487 - 506
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abdel Rahman, R., Van Turennout, M., & Levelt, J. W. M. (2003). Phonological encoding is not contingent on semantic feature retrieval: An electrophysiological study on object naming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 850–860.Google ScholarPubMed
Allan, D. (2004). Oxford Placement Test. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Basnight-Brown, D., Chen, L., Hua, S., Kostić, A., & Feldman, L. B. (2007). Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 65–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beck, M.-L. (1997). Regular verbs, past tense and frequency: Tracking down a potential source of NS/NNS competence differences. Second Language Research, 13, 93–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowden, H. W., Gelfand, M. P., Sanz, C., & Ullman, M. T. (2010). Verbal inflectional morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish: A frequency effects study examining storage versus composition. Language Learning, 60, 44–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, G. D. (1984). A frequency count of 190,000 words in the London-Lund Corpus of English conversation. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 16, 502–532.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods, 41, 977–990.CrossRefGoogle 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 & Language, 127, 345–355.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Budd, M. J., Paulmann, S., Barry, C., & Clahsen, H. (in press). Producing morphologically complex words: An ERP study with children and adults. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (1995) Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10, 425–455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christoffels, I. K., Firk, C., & Schiller, N. O. (2007). Bilingual language control: An event-related brain potential study. Brain Research, 1147, 192–208.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clahsen, H. (2006). Dual-mechanism morphology. In Brown, K. (ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (Vol. 4, 2nd ed., pp. 1–5). Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Balkhair, L., Schutter, J.-S., & Cunnings, I. (2013). The time course of morphological processing in a second language. Second Language Research, 29, 7–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Felser, C., Neubauer, K., Silva, R., & Sato, M. (2010). Morphological structure in native and non-native language processing. Language Learning, 60, 21–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costa, A., Strijkers, K., Martin, C., & Thierry, G. (2009). The time course of word retrieval revealed by event-related brain potentials during overt speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 21442–21446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Diego-Balaguer, R., Sebastián-Gallés, N., Díaz, B., & Rodríguez-Fornells, A. (2005). Morphological processing in early bilinguals: An ERP study on regular and irregular verb processing. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 312–327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eulitz, C., Hauk, O., & Cohen, R. (2000). Electroencephalographic activity over temporal brain areas during phonological encoding in picture naming. Clinical Neurophysiology, 111, 2088–2097.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feldman, L. B., Kostić, A., Basnight-Brown, D., Filipović Durdević, D., & Pastizzo, M. J. (2010). Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 119–135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ganushchak, L. Y., Christoffels, I. K., & Schiller, N. O. (2011). The use of electroencephalography in language production research: A review. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 208.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ganushchak, L.Y., & Schiller, N. O. (2009). Speaking one's second language under time pressure: An ERP study of verbal self-monitoring in German–Dutch bilinguals. Psychophysiology, 46, 410–419.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Cera, C., & Sandoval, T. C (2008). More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 787–814.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F. (1997). Processing mixed language: Issues, findings and models. In De Groot, A. & Kroll, J. F. (Eds.), Tutorials in bilingualism: Psycholinguistic perspectives (pp. 225–254). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Guo, T., & Peng, D. (2007). Speaking words in the second language: From semantics to phonology in 170 milliseconds. Neuroscience Research, 57, 387–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hahne, A., Mueller, J. L., & Clahsen, H. (2006). Morphological processing in a second language: Behavioral and event-related brain potential evidence for storage and decomposition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 121–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanulová, J., Davidson, D. J., & Indefrey, P. (2010). Where does the delay in L2 picture naming come from? Psycholinguistic and neurocognitive evidence on second language word production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27, 902–934.Google Scholar
Indefrey, P., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2004). The spatial and temporal signature of word production components. Cognition, 92, 101–144.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jacob, G., Fleischhauer, E., & Clahsen, H. (2013). Stem allomorphy and affixation in morphological processing: A cross-modal priming study with late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 924–933.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jansma, B. M., Rodríguez-Fornells, A., Möller, J., & Münte, T. F. (2004). Electrophysiological studies of speech production. In Pechmann, T. & Habel, C. (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to language production. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Janssen, M., Carreiras, M., & Barber, H. A. (2011). Electrophysiological effect of semantic context in picture and word naming. NeuroImage, 57, 1243–1250.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kirkici, B., & Clahsen, H. (2013). Inflection and derivation in native and non-native language processing: Masked priming experiments on Turkish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 776–794.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koester, D., & Schiller, N. O. (2008). Morphological priming in overt language production: Electrophysiological evidence from Dutch. NeuroImage, 42, 1622–1630.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lalleman, J. A., van Santen, A. J., & van Heuven, V. J. (1997). L2 processing of Dutch regular and irregular verbs. Review of Applied Linguistics, 115/116, 1–26.Google Scholar
Lehtonen, M, Hultén, A., Rodríguez-Fornells, A., Cunillera, T., Tuomainen, J., & Laine, M. (2012). Differences in word recognition between early bilinguals and monolinguals: Behavioral and ERP evidence. Neuropsychologia, 50, 1362–1371.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levelt, W. J., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral Brain Sciences, 22, 1–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lück, M., Hahne, A., & Clahsen, H. (2006). Brain potentials to morphologically complex words during listening. Brain Research, 1077, 144–152.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2007). Morphological processes in language comprehension. In Gaskel, G. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. (pp. 175–193). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Masterson, J., Stuart, M., Dixon, M., Lovejoy, D., & Lovejoy, S. (2003). The Children's Printed Word Database. Unpublished manuscript, University of Essex, Department of Psychology.Google Scholar
McDonald, J. (2006). Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 381–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Misra, M., Guo, T., Bobb, S. C., & Kroll, J. F. (2011). Local and global inhibition in bilingual word production: fMRI evidence from Chinese–English bilinguals. NeuroImage, 56, 2300–2309.Google Scholar
Moreno, E. M., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., & Laine, M. (2008). Event-related potentials (ERPs) in the study of bilingual language processing. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 12, 477–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mueller, J. L. (2005). Electrophysiological correlates of second language processing. Second Language Research, 21, 152–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neubauer, K., & Clahsen, H. (2009). Decomposition of inflected words in a second language: An experimental study of German participles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31, 403–435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, A. J., Ullman, M. T., Pancheva, R., Waligura, D. L., & Neville, H. J. (2007). An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection. NeuroImage, 34, 435–445.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ojima, S., Nakata, H., & Kakigi, R. (2005). An ERP study of second language learning after childhood: Effects of proficiency. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 1212–1228.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Osterhout, L., Poliakov, A., Inoue, K., McLaughlin, J., Valentine, G., Pitkanen, I., et al. (2008). Second-language learning and changes in the brain. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 509–521.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Patterson, K., & McClelland, J. (2002). Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 465–472.Google Scholar
Penke, M., Weyerts, H., Gross, M., Zander, E., Münte, T., & Clahsen, H. (1997). How the brain processes complex words: An ERP-study of German verb inflections. Cognitive Brain Research, 6, 37–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Pinker., S., & Ullman, M. T. (2002). The past and the future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 456–463.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pliatsikas, C., & Marinis, T. (2013). Processing of regular and irregular past tense morphology in highly proficient second language learners of English: A self-paced reading study. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34, 943–970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossi, S., Gugler, M. F., Friederici, A. D., & Hahne, A. (2006). The impact of proficiency on syntactic second-language processing of German and Italian: Evidence from event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 2030–2048.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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, 326, 445–449.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmitt, B. M., Münte, T. F., & Kutas, M. (2000). Electrophysiological estimates of the time course of semantic and phonological encoding during implicit picture naming. Psychophysiology, 37, 473–484.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Silva, R., & Clahsen, H. (2008). Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 245–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanners, R., Neiser, J., Hernon, W., & Hall, R. (1979). Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 399–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stockall, L., & Marantz, A. (2006). A single route, full decomposition model of morphological complexity: MEG evidence. Mental Lexicon, 1, 85–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strijkers, K., & Costa, A. (2011). Riding the lexical speedway: A critical review on the time course of lexical selection in speech production. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 356.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strijkers, K., & Costa, A. (2012). The neurocognition of language production: Introduction to the special topic. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 6, 52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strijkers, K., Costa, A., & Thierry, G. (2010). Tracking lexical access in speech production: Electrophysiological correlates of word frequency and cognate effects. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 913–928.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strijkers, K., Holcomb, P. J., & Costa, A. (2011). Conscious intention to speak proactively facilitates lexical access during overt object naming. Journal of Memory and Language, 65, 345–362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tokowicz, N., & MacWhinney, B. (2005). Implicit and explicit measures of sensitivity to violations in second language grammar: An event-related potential investigation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 173–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Turennout, M., Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (1997). Electrophysiological evidence on the time course of semantic and phonological processes in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 787–806.Google ScholarPubMed
Verhoef, K., Roelofs, A., & Chwilla, D. (2009). Role of inhibition in language switching: Evidence from event-related brain potentials in overt picture naming. Cognition, 110, 84–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wohlert, A. B. (1993). Event-related brain potentials preceding speech and non-speech oral movements of varying complexity. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 897–905.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wu, Y. J., & Thierry, G. (2011). Event-related brain potential investigation of preparation for speech production in late bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 114.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yang, C. D. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar