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Abstract: The aim of the study was to investigate how the input modality affects the processing of a morphologically complex word. The processing of Finnish inflected vs. monomorphemic words and pseudowords was examined during a lexical decision task, using behavioral responses and event-related potentials. The stimuli were presented in two modalities, visually and auditorily, to two groups of participants. Half of the words and pseudowords carried a case-inflection. At the behavioral level, the inflected words elicited a processing cost with longer decision latencies and higher error rates. At the neural level, pseudowords elicited an N400 effect, which was more pronounced in the visual modality. Inflected words elicited an N400 effect in both modalities, which, however, differed in topography and latency. The N400 effect for inflected words most probably reflects access and possible integration of the stem and suffix. The results suggest that the inflectional processing cost stems from the later, lexical-semantic stage of processing in both modalities. The ERP responses to inflected pseudowords did not differ from the ERP responses to monomorphemic pseudowords in either modality, suggesting that combinatorial case-inflection processing requires a real word stem in order to proceed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Animacy is often conceived as a special semantic feature because of its relevance to thematic and syntactic processing. This study uses event-related brain potentials to investigate whether violations of the expected animacy value of a noun are processed differently from semantic violations which preserve the expected animacy value in a situation in which the animate/inanimate distinction has no consequences for thematic or syntactic processing. The language under test is Polish, a language in which the animate–inanimate distinction is reflected in the inflection of nouns. We constructed short stories such that either an animate direct object noun is highly expected in the story''s final sentence, or an inanimate direct object. This noun appears in one of three conditions: (a) congruent, i.e. fitting the preceding context, (b) semantic violation without a violation of the expected animacy value, or (c) animacy violation, i.e. a violation of the expected animacy value. Semantic violations and animacy violations elicited a biphasic N400/P600 pattern. The N400 effect had the same amplitude for the two types of violation, while the P600 elicited by animacy violations had a significantly higher amplitude than the P600 elicited by semantic violations. These results indicate that animacy is processed differently from other semantic features even in syntactically and thematically unambiguous positions in a sentence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study uses event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the temporal sequencing of structural (grammatical) and lexical (semantic) properties of complex words during language comprehension. Morphologically complex words do not only consist of stems and affixes (e.g., ‘feel’+‘-s’), but affixes also contain grammatical structure, viz. feature bundles specifying their morpho-syntactic functions (e.g., -s= [3rd person, singular, present tense]). We examined inflected adjectives of German, which consist of an unaltered stem plus a portmanteau affix encoding case, number and gender. The same group of 24 adult native speakers was tested in two cross-modal ERP priming experiments separately studying effects of lexical–semantic relatedness and related affixes. The results of these experiments revealed clearly distinct brain potentials. Prime-target overlap with respect to morpho-syntactic features was associated with a reduced positivity, whereas lexical-level priming led to a reduced negativity. The former was most pronounced between 200 and 300ms and the latter in a later time window, between 300 and 400ms. We interpret the reduced early positivity as reflecting ease of grammatical processing effort in case of primed (relative to unprimed) morpho-syntactic features and the reduced negativity as signaling facilitation in lexical retrieval for primed (compared to unprimed) words. Our ERP results indicate that grammatical information becomes available earlier than semantic information providing support for structure-first models of language processing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Syntactic anomalies reliably elicit P600 effects. Recent studies, however, reported P600 effects to semantic anomalies. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the common view on the P600 as a purely syntactic component. The present study—carried out in Dutch—tested the possibility that a P600 to semantic anomalies would nevertheless reflect syntactic processing. We presented semantic reversal anomalies in syntactically correct and unambiguous sentences, like #The cat that fled from the mice…. If participants would use a plausibility strategy and combine the lexical items in the most plausible way, they would—in the case of the example—assume that the mice were fleeing from the cat. Furthermore, this interpretation could lead them to expect a particular inflection of the verb (here: plural inflection). The violation of this expectation could have elicited the P600 effect. Such a syntactic mismatch can occur only in sentences in which the number of theme and agent are different. Therefore, in the present study, the number of theme and agent was either different or the same. A centroparietal P600 effect was present not only in different number sentences but also in same number sentences. Consequently, the P600 effect was not due to a syntactic mismatch, thereby challenging a purely syntactic account of the P600. An alternative view concerning the functional significance of the P600 is discussed, i.e., that it reflects a monitoring component that checks upon the veridicality of ones sentence perception. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]