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Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features
Martina Penke1, Ulrike Janssen, Sonja Eisenbeiss
1Institut fuer Sprache und Information, Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet Duesseldorf, D-40225 Duesseldorf, Germany. penke@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de
Brain and Language
|June 3, 2004
Summary
German speakers showed processing delays when inflected word forms had incorrect positive grammatical features, suggesting positive features are actively represented, unlike negative ones.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Morphology
- Syntax
Background:
- Inflected word forms are central to grammar, but the cognitive representation of their feature specifications remains debated.
- Theories of underspecification propose different roles for positive versus negative feature specifications in linguistic processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the cognitive status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features in German.
- To test the hypothesis of radical underspecification in real-time language processing.
Main Methods:
- Two sentence-matching experiments were conducted with German native speakers.
- Participants judged the identity of sentence pairs containing inflected adjectives or determiners.
- Reaction times were measured to detect processing delays.
Main Results:
- A significant processing delay was observed when inflected forms had positive feature specifications that mismatched the grammatical context.
- No such delay occurred when mismatches involved negative feature specifications, provided positive features matched.
- This asymmetry supports differential cognitive treatment of positive and negative features.
Conclusions:
- The findings provide evidence for a distinct cognitive status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features.
- Results support the theory of radical underspecification, where only positive features are explicitly represented in morphologically complex forms.