MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MORPHOLOGICALLY COMPLEX WORDS - AN EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL STUDY WITH ADULT HUMANS

Event related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 subjects w hile performing a lexical decision task. Regular and irregular German participles were presented twice (identical repetition) or were primed by their related infinitives (morphological repetition). Regular part iciples primed by their infinitives displayed ERP waveforms similar to those evoked by identical repetitions, namely a large positivity with an onset latency of about 200 ms. Irregular participles, by contrast, showed no reliable morphological repetition effects. The results are discussed in terms of the controversy between approaches proposing a s ingle representational mechanism for regular and irregular inflection and the 'dual mechanism' account that suggests an associative memory f or the storage of irregulars and a rule-based symbolic processor for g enerating regular forms.