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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 6, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Brain potentials to inflected adjectives: beyond storage and decomposition.

Alina Leminen¹, Harald Clahsen²

¹Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Cognitive Science, Institute of Behavioral Sciences, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland; Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany.

|October 29, 2013

Summary

This study reveals grammatical information is processed before semantic information during language comprehension. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) show distinct neural patterns for grammatical versus lexical processing.

Keywords:

ERP Inflection Lexical–semantics Morpho-syntactic feature Morphology N400

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Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Language comprehension involves processing both word meaning (lexical-semantic) and word structure (grammatical).
Morphologically complex words integrate stems with affixes carrying grammatical information.
The temporal order of processing these distinct linguistic properties remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the temporal sequencing of grammatical and lexical processing during language comprehension.
To differentiate the neural correlates of processing morpho-syntactic features versus lexical-semantic relatedness.
To provide evidence for or against structure-first models of language processing.

Main Methods:

Utilized event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in two cross-modal ERP priming experiments.
Tested 24 adult native German speakers with inflected adjectives.
Separately examined effects of lexical-semantic relatedness and related affixes.

Main Results:

Distinct ERP components were observed for grammatical and lexical priming.
Morpho-syntactic feature priming elicited reduced early positivity (200-300 ms).
Lexical-semantic priming resulted in reduced later negativity (300-400 ms).

Conclusions:

Early positive ERPs suggest reduced grammatical processing effort when morpho-syntactic features are primed.
Later negative ERPs indicate facilitated lexical retrieval for primed words.
Grammatical information appears to be processed earlier than semantic information in language comprehension.