Electrophysiological correlates of morphosyntactic integration in German phrasal context

Abstract

The morphosyntactic paradigm of an inflected word can influence isolated word recognition, but its role in multiple-word phrasal integration is less clear. We examined the electrophysiological response to adjectives in short German prepositional phrases to evaluate whether strong and weak forms of the adjective show a differential response, and whether paradigm variables are related to this response. Twenty native German speakers classified serially presented phrases as grammatically correct or not while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. A functional mixed effects model of the response to grammatically correct trials revealed a differential response to strong and weak forms of the adjectives. This response difference depended on whether the preceding preposition imposed accusative or dative case. The lexically conditioned information content of the adjectives modulated a later interval of the response. The results indicate that grammatical context modulates the response to morphosyntactic information content, and lends support to the role of paradigm structure in integrative phrasal processing.

Keywords:

• Paradigm
• Syntactic integration
• Parsing
• Information theory
• Inflectional morphology

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the Dutch and German science foundations Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG), respectively. Daniel von Rhein recruited subjects, helped to construct materials, and assisted in data collection. Christiane Fritz constructed the set of German materials, and assisted in data collection. Victor Kuperman provided valuable feedback on an earlier version of this article. Portions of this work were presented at the Third International Conference of Cognitive Science 2008, Moscow; as well as the 6th International Morphology Processing Conference (MOPROC) 2009 in Turku.

Notes

¹Note that with a more restricted set of electrodes centered around the approximate location of F7, there is stronger evidence for this Dcln*Prep interaction, with the same functional form as shown in Figure 2a.