How Germans prepare for the English past tense: Silent production of inflected words during EEG
- 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.
| Author details: | Julia FestmanORCiDGND, Harald ClahsenORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716415000089 |
| ISSN: | 0142-7164 |
| ISSN: | 1469-1817 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Applied psycholinguistics : psychological and linguistic studies across languages and learners |
| Publisher: | Cambridge Univ. Press |
| Place of publishing: | New York |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first publication: | 2016 |
| Publication year: | 2016 |
| Release date: | 2020/03/22 |
| Volume: | 37 |
| Number of pages: | 20 |
| First page: | 487 |
| Last Page: | 506 |
| Funding institution: | Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Exzellenzbereich Kognitionswissenschaften |
