TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Jessen, Anna T1 - Do bilingual children lag behind? A study of morphological encoding using ERPs JF - Journal of child language N2 - The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual children's spoken responses and their ERPs were compared to previous datasets from monolingual children on the same task. We found an enhanced negativity for regular relative to irregular forms during silent production in both bilingual children's languages, replicating the ERP effect previously obtained from monolingual children. Nevertheless, the bilingual children produced more morphological errors (viz. over-regularizations) than monolingual children. We conclude that mechanisms of morphological encoding (as measured by ERPs) are parallel for bilingual and monolingual children, and that the increased over-regularization rates are due to their reduced exposure to each of the two languages (relative to monolingual children). KW - morphology KW - event-related brain potentials KW - bilingualism Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000919000321 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 46 IS - 5 SP - 955 EP - 979 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Jessen, Anna T1 - Morphological generalization in bilingual language production BT - age of acquisition determines variability JF - Language acquisition : a journal of developmental linguistics N2 - Morphological variability in bilingual language production is widely attested. Producing inflected words has been found to be less reliable and consistent in bilinguals than in first-language (functionally monolingual) L1 speakers, even for bilingual speakers at advanced proficiency levels. The sources for these differences are not well understood. The current study presents a detailed investigation of morphological generalization processes in bilingual speakers' language production. We examined past participle formation of German using an elicited-production experiment containing nonce verbs with varying degrees of similarity to existing verbs testing a large group of bilingual Turkish/German speakers relative to L1 German speakers. We compared similarity-based lexical extensions with generalizations of morphological rules. The results show that rule-based generalizations are used less often and more variably within the bilingual group than within the L1 group. Our results also show a selective effect of age of acquisition on the bilingual speakers' morphological generalizations. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.1910267 SN - 1048-9223 SN - 1532-7817 VL - 28 IS - 4 SP - 370 EP - 386 PB - Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group CY - London ER - TY - GEN A1 - Jacob, Gunnar A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Introduction BT - priming paradigms in bilingualism research T2 - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - The present thematic set of studies comprises five concise review articles on the use of priming paradigms in different areas of bilingualism research. Their aim is to provide readers with a quick overview of how priming paradigms can be employed in particular subfields of bilingualism research and to make readers aware of the methodological issues that need to be considered when using priming techniques. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728918000135 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 21 IS - 3 SP - 435 EP - 436 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Farhy, Yael A1 - Veríssimo, Joao Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Universal and particular in morphological processing BT - evidence from Hebrew JF - The quarterly journal of experimental psychology N2 - Do properties of individual languages shape the mechanisms by which they are processed? By virtue of their non-concatenative morphological structure, the recognition of complex words in Semitic languages has been argued to rely strongly on morphological information and on decomposition into root and pattern constituents. Here, we report results from a masked priming experiment in Hebrew in which we contrasted verb forms belonging to two morphological classes, Paal and Piel, which display similar properties, but crucially differ on whether they are extended to novel verbs. Verbs from the open-class Piel elicited familiar root priming effects, but verbs from the closed-class Paal did not. Our findings indicate that, similarly to other (e.g., Indo-European) languages, down-to-the-root decomposition in Hebrew does not apply to stems of non-productive verbal classes. We conclude that the Semitic word processor is less unique than previously thought: Although it operates on morphological units that are combined in a non-linear way, it engages the same universal mechanisms of storage and computation as those seen in other languages. KW - Language universals KW - morphology KW - priming KW - Semitic Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1310917 SN - 1747-0218 SN - 1747-0226 VL - 71 IS - 5 SP - 1125 EP - 1133 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Uygun, Serkan A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphological processing in heritage speakers BT - a masked priming study on the Turkish aorist JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words. KW - Turkish KW - morphology KW - aorist KW - priming KW - variability KW - processing Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000577 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 3 SP - 415 EP - 426 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - Veríssimo, Joao Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Inflectional morphology in bilingual language processing BT - an age-of-acquisition study T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using the cross-modal lexical priming technique, we investigated stem allomorphs of German verbs that encode multiple morphosyntactic features. The results revealed a striking AoA modulation of observed priming patterns, indicating efficient access to morphosyntactic features for early AoAs and a gradual decline with increasing AoAs. In addition, we found a discontinuity in the function relating AoA to morphosyntactic feature access, suggesting a sensitive period for the development of morphosyntax. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 569 KW - critical-period KW - 2nd-language grammar KW - adjectives KW - lexicon KW - L1 KW - L2 Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-433371 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 569 SP - 339 EP - 360 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ciaccio, Laura Anna A1 - Kgolo, Naledi A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphological decomposition in Bantu BT - a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents. KW - prefixes KW - inflection KW - affix stripping KW - visual word recognition KW - African KW - languages Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2020.1722847 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 35 IS - 10 SP - 1257 EP - 1271 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nakano, Yoko A1 - Ikemoto, Yu A1 - Jacob, Gunnar A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Orthography Modulates Morphological Priming BT - Subliminal Kanji Activation in Japanese JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - The current study investigates to what extent masked morphological priming is modulated by language-particular properties, specifically by its writing system. We present results from two masked priming experiments investigating the processing of complex Japanese words written in less common (moraic) scripts. In Experiment 1, participants performed lexical decisions on target verbs; these were preceded by primes which were either (i) a past-tense form of the same verb, (ii) a stem-related form with the epenthetic vowel -i, (iii) a semantically-related form, and (iv) a phonologically-related form. Significant priming effects were obtained for prime types (i), (ii), and (iii), but not for (iv). This pattern of results differs from previous findings on languages with alphabetic scripts, which found reliable masked priming effects for morphologically related prime/target pairs of type (i), but not for non-affixal and semantically-related primes of types (ii), and (iii). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime/target pairs which are neither morphologically, semantically, phonologically nor - as presented in their moraic scripts—orthographically related, but which—in their commonly written form—share the same kanji, which are logograms adopted from Chinese. The results showed a significant priming effect, with faster lexical-decision times for kanji-related prime/target pairs relative to unrelated ones. We conclude that affix-stripping is insufficient to account for masked morphological priming effects across languages, but that language-particular properties (in the case of Japanese, the writing system) affect the processing of (morphologically) complex words. KW - morphologically complex words KW - morpho-orthography KW - decompositon KW - Japanese KW - kanji KW - kana Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00316 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 7 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - GEN A1 - Nakano, Yoko A1 - Ikemoto, Yu A1 - Jacob, Gunnar A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Orthography Modulates Morphological Priming BT - Subliminal Kanji Activation in Japanese N2 - The current study investigates to what extent masked morphological priming is modulated by language-particular properties, specifically by its writing system. We present results from two masked priming experiments investigating the processing of complex Japanese words written in less common (moraic) scripts. In Experiment 1, participants performed lexical decisions on target verbs; these were preceded by primes which were either (i) a past-tense form of the same verb, (ii) a stem-related form with the epenthetic vowel -i, (iii) a semantically-related form, and (iv) a phonologically-related form. Significant priming effects were obtained for prime types (i), (ii), and (iii), but not for (iv). This pattern of results differs from previous findings on languages with alphabetic scripts, which found reliable masked priming effects for morphologically related prime/target pairs of type (i), but not for non-affixal and semantically-related primes of types (ii), and (iii). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime/target pairs which are neither morphologically, semantically, phonologically nor - as presented in their moraic scripts—orthographically related, but which—in their commonly written form—share the same kanji, which are logograms adopted from Chinese. The results showed a significant priming effect, with faster lexical-decision times for kanji-related prime/target pairs relative to unrelated ones. We conclude that affix-stripping is insufficient to account for masked morphological priming effects across languages, but that language-particular properties (in the case of Japanese, the writing system) affect the processing of (morphologically) complex words. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 293 KW - Japanese KW - decompositon KW - kana KW - kanji KW - morpho-orthography KW - morphologically complex words Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-91692 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Jessen, Anna T1 - Do bilingual children lag behind? BT - A study of morphological encoding using ERPs T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual children's spoken responses and their ERPs were compared to previous datasets from monolingual children on the same task. We found an enhanced negativity for regular relative to irregular forms during silent production in both bilingual children's languages, replicating the ERP effect previously obtained from monolingual children. Nevertheless, the bilingual children produced more morphological errors (viz. over-regularizations) than monolingual children. We conclude that mechanisms of morphological encoding (as measured by ERPs) are parallel for bilingual and monolingual children, and that the increased over-regularization rates are due to their reduced exposure to each of the two languages (relative to monolingual children). T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 682 KW - morphology KW - event-related brain potentials KW - bilingualism Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-469727 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 682 ER -