Event-related potentials demonstrate prolonged N400 priming effects for English irregular verbs

Evidence from event-related potentials has an important role to play in refining current models of inflectional morphology. Here, we present ERP data regarding the English past tense, using an immediate-priming design that frequently has been used in both healthy and neuropsychological populations (Tyler et al., 2002). The majority of extant ERP studies of inflectional morphology have adopted either priming designs based on lags of intervening items, which are argued to result in N400 effects specifically for regular morphology (Münte, Say, Clahsen, Schiltz, & Kutas, 1999), or designs employing morphological violations, which are argued to result in LAN-like effects specifically for overregularizations (Penke et al., 1997). The dissociations that have been found in the above work often have been used in support of dual-route models of the English past tense, in which regular past tenses are produced by affixation of the default (–ed) form, whereas irregular past tenses are stored in associative memory (Pinker & Ullman, 2002). Dual-system models have been challenged by connectionist theorists who argue that both regular and irregular morphology can be modeled within a single system that maps relationships between phonology, orthography, and semantics. Importantly, many such models specifically have been designed to account for behavioral data in immediate priming tasks (Plaut & Gonnerman, 2000). Thus, we wished to bridge these literatures with the ERP literature by using a more analogous design.