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

• Autores: Julia Festman, Harald Clahsen
• Localización: Applied psycholinguistics, ISSN 0142-7164, Vol. 37, Nº 2, 2016, págs. 487-506
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • 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.