TY  - JOUR
A1  - Domahs, Ulrike
A1  - Knaus, Johannes
A1  - Orzechowska, Paula
A1  - Wiese, Richard
T1  - Stress "deafness" in a language with fixed word stress an ERR study on Polish
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-"deaf" for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.
KW  - stress "deafness"
KW  - fixed stress system
KW  - prosodic representation
KW  - P300
KW  - generalized error-detection mechanism
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00439
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 3
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Smolka, Eva
A1  - Khader, Patrick H.
A1  - Wiese, Richard
A1  - Zwitserlood, Pienie
A1  - Rösler, Frank
T1  - Electrophysiological Evidence for the Continuous Processing of Linguistic Categories of Regular and Irregular Verb Inflection in German
JF  - Journal of cognitive neuroscience
N2  - A central question concerning word recognition is whether linguistic categories are processed in continuous or categorical ways, in particular, whether regular and irregular inflection is stored and processed by the same or by distinct systems. Here, we contribute to this issue by contrasting regular (regular stem, regular suffix) with semi-irregular (regular stem, irregular suffix) and irregular (irregular stem, irregular suffix) participle formation in a visual priming experiment on German verb inflection. We measured ERPs and RTs and manipulated the inflectional and meaning relatedness between primes and targets. Inflected verb targets (e. g., leite, "head") were preceded either by themselves, by their participle (geleitet, "headed"), by a semantically related verb in the same inflection as the target (fuhre, "guide") or in the participle form (gefuhrt, "guided"), or by an unrelated verb in the same inflection (nenne, "name"). Results showed that behavioral and ERP priming effects were gradually affected by verb regularity. Regular participles produced a widely distributed frontal and parietal effect, irregular participles produced a small left parietal effect, and semi-irregular participles yielded an effect in-between these two in terms of amplitude and topography. The behavioral and ERP effects further showed that the priming because of participles differs from that because of semantic associates for all verb types. These findings argue for a single processing system that generates participle priming effects for regular, semi-irregular, and irregular verb inflection. Together, the findings provide evidence that the linguistic categories of verb inflection are processed continuously. We present a single-system model that can adequately account for such graded effects.
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00384
SN  - 0898-929X
VL  - 25
IS  - 8
SP  - 1284
EP  - 1304
PB  - MIT Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -