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How Germans prepare for the English past tense: Silent production of inflected words during EEG

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2015

JULIA FESTMAN  and
HARALD CLAHSEN
JULIA FESTMAN
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam, Germany
HARALD CLAHSEN*
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam, Germany
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Harald Clahsen, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam, Haus 2, Campus Golm, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 487 - 506
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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