University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2013 Aug;25(8):1284-304. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00384. Epub 2013 Mar 14.
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 (führe, "guide") or in the participle form (geführt, "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.
一个关于单词识别的核心问题是语言类别是连续处理还是分类处理，特别是规则和不规则屈折是否由相同或不同的系统存储和处理。在这里，我们通过对比德语动词屈折中的规则（规则词根，规则后缀）、半不规则（规则词根，不规则后缀）和不规则（不规则词根，不规则后缀）分词形式的视觉启动实验来探讨这个问题。我们测量了 ERP 和 RT，并操纵了启动词和目标词之间的屈折和意义相关性。屈折动词目标词（例如，leite，“head”）之前可以是它们自己、它们的分词（geleitet，“headed”）、与目标词在同一屈折形式中的语义相关动词（führe，“guide”）或分词形式（geführt，“guided”），或者与同一屈折形式中的不相关动词（nenne，“name”）。结果表明，行为和 ERP 启动效应逐渐受到动词规则性的影响。规则分词产生了广泛分布的额顶效应，不规则分词产生了小的左顶叶效应，而半不规则分词在幅度和拓扑上介于这两种效应之间。行为和 ERP 效应进一步表明，分词引起的启动效应与所有动词类型的语义联想引起的启动效应不同。这些发现支持了一个单一的处理系统，该系统可以为规则、半不规则和不规则动词屈折产生分词启动效应。总的来说，这些发现为动词屈折的语言类别连续处理提供了证据。我们提出了一个单一系统模型，可以充分解释这种渐变效应。
