Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:18:22.293Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The time-course of morphosyntactic and semantic priming in late bilinguals: A study of German adjectives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2016

SINA BOSCH ,
HELENA KRAUSE  and
ALINA LEMINEN
SINA BOSCH*
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam
HELENA KRAUSE
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam
ALINA LEMINEN
Affiliation:
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience and MINDLab, Aarhus University Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki
*
Address for Correspondence: Sina Bosch, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24–25, 14476 Potsdam, Germanysbmbpo@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming experiments on inflected German adjectives testing a group of advanced late Russian learners of German in comparison to native speaker (L1) controls. While in the behavioral experiment, the L2 learners performed native-like, the ERP data revealed clear L1/L2 differences with respect to the temporal dynamics of grammatical processing. Specifically, our results show that L2 morphosyntactic processing yielded temporally and spatially extended brain responses relative to L1 processing, indicating that grammatical processing of inflected words in an L2 is more demanding and less automatic than in the L1. However, this group of advanced L2 learners showed native-like lexical-semantic processing.

Keywords

InflectionEEGGrammatical ProcessingMental Lexicon
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 435 - 456
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The research reported here was supported by an Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship to Harald Clahsen and a postgraduate studentship from the German National Academic Foundation to SB. AL is supported by Lundbeck Foundation and KONE Foundation. We are grateful to the members of the Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism for detailed and helpful comments on the present work, in particular to Harald Clahsen.

References

Amenta, S., & Crepaldi, D. (2012). Morphological processing as we know it: An analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 1–12.Google Scholar
Anderson, S. (1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology by itself. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, H., Piepenbrock, R., & van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX lexical database (CD-ROM). Philadelphia, PE: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Basnight-Brown, D. M., Chen, L., Hua, S., Kostić, A., & Feldman, L. B. (2007). Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience. Journal of memory and language, 57, 65–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bendixen, A., Prinz, W., Horváth, J., Trujillo-Barreto, N. J., & Schröger, E. (2008). Rapid extraction of auditory feature contingencies. NeuroImage, 41, 1111–1119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bierwisch, M. (1967). Syntactic features in morphology: General problems of so-called pronominal inflection in German. To honor Roman Jakobson, pp. 239–270. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Blevins, J. P. (1995). Syncretism and paradigmatic opposition. Linguistics and Philosophy, 18, 113–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. P. (2000). Markedness and blocking in German declensional paradigms. In Stiebels, B. & Wunderlich, D. (eds.), Lexicon in focus, pp. 83–103. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Bosch, S., & Clahsen, H. (in revision). Accessing Morphosyntax in L1 and L2 Word Recognition? A Priming Study of Inflected German Adjectives, The Mental Lexicon.Google Scholar
Bowden, H., Gelfand, M., Sanz, C., & Ullman, M. (2010). Verbal inflectional morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish: A frequency effects study examining storage versus composition. Language Learning, 60, 44–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bozic, M., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2010). Neurocognitive contexts for morphological complexity: Dissociating inflection and derivation. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4, 1063–1073.Google Scholar
Chen, L., Shu, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, J., & Li, P. (2007). ERP signatures of subject-verb agreement in L2 learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 161–174.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006a). How native-like is non-native language processing? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 564–570.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006b). Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 3–42.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Balkhair, L., Schutter, J.-S., & Cunnings, I. (2013). The time course of morphological processing in a second language. Second Language Research, 29, 7–31.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiss, S., Hadler, M., & Sonnenstuhl, I. (2001). The mental representation of inflected words: An experimental study of adjectives and verbs in German. Linguistics, 77, 510–543.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Felser, C., Sato, M., & Silva, R. (2010). Morphological structure in native and nonnative language processing. Language Learning, 60, 21–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crepaldi, D., Rastle, K., Colheart, M., & Nickels, L. (2010). ‘Fell’ primes ‘fall’, but does ‘bell’ prime ‘ball’? Masked priming with irregularly-inflected primes. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 83–99.Google Scholar
Curran, T., Schacter, D. L., & Galluccio, L. (1999). Cross-modal priming and explicit memory in patients with verbal production deficits. Brain and Cognition, 39, 133–146.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidson, D. J., & Indefrey, P. (2009). An event-related potential study on changes of violation and error responses during morphosyntactic learning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 433–446.Google Scholar
de Diego Balaguer, R., Sebastián-Gallés, N., Diaz, B., & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2005). Morphological processing in early bilinguals: An ERP study of regular and irregular verb processing. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 312–327.Google Scholar
DeKeyser, R. (2005). What makes learning a second-language grammar difficult? A review of issues. Language Learning, 55, 1–25.Google Scholar
Dewaele, J.-M., & Véronique, D. (2001). Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: a cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 275–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diependaele, K., Duñabeitia, J., Morris, J., & Keuleers, E. (2011). Fast morphological effects in first and second langauge word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 344–358.Google Scholar
Dimroth, C. (2008). Age effects on the process of L2 acquisition? Evidence from the acquisition of negation and finiteness in L2 German. Language Learning, 58, 117–150.Google Scholar
Dowens, M. G., Vergara, M., Barber, H. A., & Carreiras, M. (2010). Morphosyntactic processing in late second-language learners. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 1870–1887.Google Scholar
Feldman, L. B., Kostic, A., Basnight-Brown, D. M., Filipovic Djurdjevic, D., & Pastizzo, M. J. (2010). Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 119–135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Felser, C., & Cunnings, I. (2012). Processing reflexives in a second language: The timing of structural and discourse-level constraints. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33, 571–603.Google Scholar
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 35, 116–124.Google Scholar
Foucart, A., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2011). Grammatical gender processing in L2: Electrophysiological evidence of the effect of L1-L2 syntactic similarity. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14, 379–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucart, A., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2012). Can late L2 learners acquire new grammatical features? Evidence from ERPs and eye-tracking. Journal of Memory and Language, 66, 226–248.Google Scholar
Friederici, A. D. (2002). Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 78–84.Google Scholar
Friederici, A. D., & Weissenborn, J. (2007). Mapping sentence form onto meaning: The syntax-semantic interface. Brain Research, 1146, 50–58.Google Scholar
Gonnerman, L., Seidenberg, M., & Andersen, E. (2007). Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 323–345.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hahne, A., Müller, J., & Clahsen, H. (2006). Morphological processing in a second language: behavioral and event-related brain potential evidence for storage and decomposition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 121–134.Google Scholar
Haznedar, B. (2001). The Acquisition of the IP system in child L2 English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 1–39.Google Scholar
Ionin, T., & Wexler, K. (2002). Why is “is” easier than “-s”?: acquisition of tense/agreement morphology by child second language learners of English. Second Language Research, 18, 95–136.Google Scholar
Jackson, C., & Dussias, P. E. (2009). Cross-linguistic differences and their impact on L2 sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 65–82.Google Scholar
Jackson, C. N. (2008). Proficiency level and the interaction of lexical and morphosyntactic information during L2 sentence processing. Language Learning, 58, 875–909.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, C. N., & Bobb, S. C. (2009). The processing and comprehension of wh-questions among second language speakers of German. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 603–636.Google Scholar
Jacob, G., Fleischhauer, E., & Clahsen, H. (2013). Stem allomorphy and affixation in morphological processing: A cross-modal priming study with late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 924–933.Google Scholar
Keating, G. (2009). Sensitivity to violations of gender agreement in native and nonnative Spanish: An eye-movement investigation. Language Learning, 59, 503–535.Google Scholar
Kotz, S. A., & Friederici, A. D. (2003). Electrophysiology of normal and pathological language processing. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 16, 43–58.Google Scholar
Kotz, S., Schwartze, M., & Schmidt-Kassow, M. (2009). Non-motor basal ganglia functions: a review and proposal for a model of sensory predictability in auditory language perception. Cortex, 45, 982–990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krause, H., Bosch, S., & Clahsen, H. (2015). Morphosyntax in the bilingual mental lexicon: An experimental study of strong stems in German. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, available on CJO2014. doi:10.1017/S0272263114000564.Google Scholar
Kutas, M., & Schmitt, B. (2003). Language in microvolts. In Banich, M.T. & Mack, M. (eds.), Mind, brain, and language: Multidisciplinary perspectives, pp. 171–203. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Lardière, D. (1998). Case and Tense in a ‘fossilized’ steady state. Second Language Research, 14, 1–26.Google Scholar
Lavric, A., Elchlepp, H., & Rastle, K. (2012). Tracking hierarchical processing in morphological decomposition with brain potentials. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 811–816.Google ScholarPubMed
Leminen, A., & Clahsen, H. (2014). Brain potentials to inflected adjectives: beyond storage and decomposition. Brain Research, 1543, 223–234.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. (2007). Morphological processes in language comprehension. In Gaskel, G. (ed.), The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, pp.175–193. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W., Hare, M., & Older, L. (1993). Inflectional morphology and phonological regularity in the English mental lexicon. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Princeton, N.J.: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
McClelland, J., & Patterson, K. (2002). Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: what does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 465–472.Google Scholar
McDonald, J. (2006). Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 381–401.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. (2011). First and second language acquisition: parallels and differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molinaro, N., Barber, H. A., & Carreiras, M. (2011). Grammatical agreement processing in reading: ERP findings and future directions. Cortex, 47, 908–930.Google Scholar
Morris, J., & Stockall, L. (2012). Early, equivalent ERP masked priming effects for regular and irregular morphology. Brain and Language, 123, 81–93.Google Scholar
Morris, J., Grainger, J., & Holcomb, P. J. (2008). An electrophysiological investigation of early effects of masked morphological priming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, 1021–1056.Google Scholar
Morris, J., Porter, J. H., Grainger, J., & Holcomb, P. J. (2011). Effects of lexical status and morphological complexity in masked priming: An ERP study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 558–599.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, G. (2013). Does morphological underspecification exist? Grammatical and neurophysiological evidence. Presented at the Departmental Colloquium at the University of York, York.Google Scholar
Münte, T., Say, T., Clahsen, H., & Kutas, M. (1999). Decomposition of morphologically complex words in English: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials. Cognitive Brain Research, 7, 241–253.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neubauer, K., & Clahsen, H. (2009). Decomposition of inflected words in a second language: An experimental study of German participles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31, 403–435.Google Scholar
Ojima, S., Nakata, H., & Kakigi, R. (2005). An ERP study of second language learning after childhood: effects of proficiency. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 17, 1212–28.Google Scholar
Opitz, A., Regel, S., Müller, G., & Friederici, A. D. (2013). Neurophysiological evidence for morphological underspecification in German strong adjective inflection. Language, 89, 231–264.Google Scholar
Osterhout, L., Poliakov, A., Inoue, K., McLaughlin, J., Valentine, G., Pitkanen, I., Frenck-Mestre, C., & Herschensohn, J. (2008). Second-language learning and changes in the brain. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 509–521.Google Scholar
Parodi, T. (2000). Finiteness and verb placement in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 16, 355–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penke, M., Janssen, U., & Eisenbeiss, S. (2004). Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features. Brain and Language, 90, 423–433.Google Scholar
Perrin, F., Pernier, J., Bertrand, O., & Echallier, J. F. (1989). Spherical splines for scalp potential and current density mapping. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 72, 184–187.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and Rules. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rao, M. (1960). Some asymptotic results on transformations in the analysis of variance. ARL Technical Note Aerospace Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 60–126.Google Scholar
Rastle, K., & Davis, M. H. (2008). Morphological decomposition based on the analysis of orthography. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, 942–971.Google Scholar
Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Clahsen, H., Lleo, C., Zaake, W., & Münte, T. (2001). Event-related brain responses to morphological violations in Catalan. Cognitive Brain Research, 11, 47–58.Google Scholar
Rossi, S., Gugler, M., Hahne, A., & Friederici, A. D. (2005). When word category information encounters morphosyntax: An ERP study. Neuroscience Letters, 384, 228–233.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rossi, S., Gugler, M. F., Friederici, A. D., & Hahne, A. (2006). The impact of proficiency on syntactic second-language processing of German and Italian: Evidence from Event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 2030–2048.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. Parallel distributed processing. In McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E. & the P. R. Group (eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (vol. 2): Psychological and biological models, pp. 216–271. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sabourin, L., & Haverkort, M. (2003). Neural substrates of representation and processing of a second language. In van Hout, R., Hulk, A., Kuiken, F., & Towell, R. J. (eds.), The lexicon-syntax interface in second language acquisition, pp. 175–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sabourin, L., & Stowe, L. A. (2008). Second language processing: when are first and second languages processed similarly? Second Language Reserch, 24, 397–430.Google Scholar
Sagarra, N., & Herschensohn, J. (2013). Processing of gender and number agreement in late Spanish bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17, 607–627.Google Scholar
Schriefers, H., Friederici, A., & Graetz, P. (1992). Inflectional and derivational morphology in the mental lexicon: Symmetries and asymmetries in repetition priming. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44, 373–390.Google Scholar
Segalowitz, N. (2003). Automaticity and second languages. In Doughty, C. & Long, M. (eds.), The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, pp. 382–408. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva, R., & Clahsen, H. (2008). Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 245–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanners, R. F., Neiser, J., Hernon, W., & Hall, R. (1979). Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 399–412.Google Scholar
Steinhauer, K., White, E. J., & Drury, J. E. (2009). Temporal dynamics of late second language acquisition: evidence from event-related brain potentials. Second Language Research, 25, 13–41.Google Scholar
Stump, G. (2001). Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tanner, D., Osterhout, L., & Herschensohn, J. (2009). Snapshots of grammaticalization: Differential electrophysiological responses to grammatical anomalies with increasing L2 exposure. In Chandlee, J., Franchini, M., Lord, S., & Rheiner, G.-M. (eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 528–539. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.Google Scholar
Tokowicz, N., & MacWhinney, B. (2005). Implicit and explicit measures of sensitivity to violations in second language grammar: An event-related potential investigation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27, 173–204.Google Scholar
Tokowicz, N., & Warren, T. (2010). Beginning adult L2 learners’ sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations: A self-paced reading study. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 22, 1092–1106.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. (2004). Contributions of memory circuits to language: the declarative/procedural model. Cognition, 92, 231–270.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. (2005). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on second language acquisition: The declarative/procedural model. In Sanz, C. (ed.), Mind and context in adult second language acquisition: Methods, theory and practice, pp.141–178. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Veríssimo, J., & Clahsen, H. (2009). Morphological priming by itself: A study of Portuguese conjugations. Cognition, 112, 187–194.Google Scholar
Weber, K., & Lavric, A. (2008). Syntactic anomaly elicits a lexico-semantic (N400) ERP effect in the second language but not the first. Psychophysiology, 45, 920–925.Google Scholar
Westermann, G., & Ruh, N. (2012). A neuroconstructivist model of past tense development and processing. Psychological Review, 119, 649–667.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wunderlich, D. (1996). Minimalist morphology: The role of paradigms. In Booij, G. & van Marle, J. (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1995, pp. 93–114. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Wunderlich, D. (1997). Der unterspezifizierte Artikel. In Diirscheid, C., Ramers, K.-H. & Schwarz, M. (eds.), Sprache im Fokus, pp. 47–55. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Zwicky, A.M. (1985). How to describe inflection. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 11, 372–386.Google Scholar