Mental representations of morphologically complex words: an event-related potential study with adult humans

Event related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 subjects while performing a lexical decision task. Regular and irregular German principles were presented twice (identical repetition) or were primed by their related infinitives (morphological repetition). Regular participles primed by their infinitives displayed ERP waveforms similar to those evoked by identical repetitions, namely a large positivity with an onset latency of about 200 ms. Irregular participles, by contrast, showed no reliable morphological repetition effects. The results are discussed in terms of the controversy between approaches proposing a single representational mechanism for regular and irregular inflection and the "dual mechanism' account that suggests an associative memory for the storage of irregulars and a rule-based symbolic processor for generating regular forms.