Abstract
Neuropsychological dissociations between regular and irregular English past-tense morphology have been reported using a lexical decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets. We present N400 event-related potential data from healthy participants using the same design. Both regular and irregular past-tense forms primed corresponding present-tense forms, but with a longer duration for irregular verbs. Phonological control conditions suggested that differences in formal overlap between prime and target contribute to, but do not account for, this difference, suggesting a link between irregular morphology and semantics. Further analysis dividing the irregular verbs into two categories (weak irregular and strong) revealed that priming for strong verbs was reliably stronger than that for weak irregular and regular verbs, which were statistically indistinguishable from one another. We argue that, although we observe a regular-irregular dissociation, the nature of this dissociation is more consistent with single- than with dual-system models of inflectional morphology.
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This research was supported by NIH Grant P01NS40813. Some of these data were previously presented at the 2005 meetings of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in New York and the Academy of Aphasia in Amsterdam.
Note-This article was accepted by the previous editorial team, when John Jonides was Editor.
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Justus, T., Larsen, J., de Mornay Davies, P. et al. Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: Evidence from event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 8, 178–194 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.8.2.178
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.8.2.178