Event-related brain responses to morphological violations in Catalan

The ERP (event-related potential) violation paradigm was used to investigat e brain responses to morphologically correct and incorrect verb forms of Ca talan. Violations of stem formation and inflectional processes were examine d in separate experimental conditions. Our most interesting finding is that misapplications of stem formation rules elicit an early left preponderant negativity. This complements our previous ERP results on morphological viol ations in other languages in which misapplications of inflectional rules we re shown to produce such effects. We make use of the linguistic distinction between lexically stored and rule-based word forms and suggest a unified i nterpretation of the experimental results, arguing that these negativities vary as a function of processes involved in morpho-syntactic structure buil ding. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.