TY - JOUR A1 - Festman, Julia A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Germans prepare for the English past tense: Silent production of inflected words during EEG T2 - Applied psycholinguistics : psychological and linguistic studies across languages and learners N2 - 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. Y1 - 2016 UR - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45584 SN - 0142-7164 SN - 1469-1817 VL - 37 SP - 487 EP - 506 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER -