HOW THE BRAIN PROCESSES COMPLEX WORDS - AN EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL STUDY OF GERMAN VERB INFLECTIONS

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as German-speaking subjects read verbs in correct and incorrect participle forms. The cr itical words were presented in three different versions to three diffe rent groups of subjects, as part of a simple sentence, in a word list, and embedded in a story; for each version separate ERPs were recorded . Three types of verbs were investigated, regulars, irregulars and non ce verbs. We compared correct regular and irregular participles with i ncorrect ones; the latter had -(e)n on verbs that actually take -t par ticiples (getanz-en), or -(e)t on verbs that require -(e)n (*gelad-et ). For the nonce verbs, we compared participles with the unexpected -( e)n ending with the expected -t participle forms. The ERP responses we re very consistent across the three versions of the experiment: (i) in correct irregular participles (gelad-et) elicited a left frontotempor al negativity; (ii) incorrect regulars (getanz-en) produced no differ ences to the correct ones; (iii) nonce verbs were associated with an N 400 component but did not show a difference between expected and unexp ected endings. We will interpret these findings with respect to psycho linguistic models of morphological processing and argue that the brain processes regularly inflected words differently from irregularly infl ected ones, the latter by accessing full-form entries stored in memory and the former by a computational process that decomposes complex wor ds into stems and affixes. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.