TITLE:
German Plural Processing: New Evidence from ERP- and Reaction Time Experiments
AUTHORS:
Verena Winter, Carsten Eulitz, Tanja Rinker
KEYWORDS:
German Plural; Event-Related Potentials; Reaction Time Experiment
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.4 No.1,
February
14,
2014
ABSTRACT: The processing of the German plural has been examined
in a range of behavioral and neurophysiological studies. A number of studies so
far showed differences between the processing of the default plural form -s and
the irregular plural form -(e)n. While previous studies focused on the examination
of generally two plural categories (e.g. -(e)n versus -s), the current study
aimed at examining four German plural categories with different morpheme
endings and violating them cross-wise. The results of the current auditory
event-related (ERP) and reaction time study show general similarities between
the more acoustically salient plural categories. In the early latency range
from 200 - 400 ms -n violated by -s plural (and the cross-condition) act
differently from the -e versus -er plural violations (and the cross-conditions)
but in the later time windows only violation effects are visible. Processing
differences may be explained by the morphological characteristics of the plural categories and/or phonetic differences between the
suffixes.