Event-related brain dynamics during regular and irregular Russian verb production.
Boytsova J.*, Danko S.*, Medvedev S.*, Chernigovskaya T.*,**
*N.P. Bechtereva Institute of the Human Brain, RAS, Russia; **St.Petersburg State University,
Russia
boytsova.ihb@gmail.com
Theoretical aspects of this work are associated with two approaches to mental lexicon structure.
Modular approach (Pinker, 1999; Ullman, 1999, etc.) assumes that inflection of regular forms is in
accordance with a default rule, while irregular verbs are retrieved from associative memory.
Connectionist approach (Rumelhart, McClelland 1986; Bybee, 1995, etc.) argues that both
phenomena are processed by a single mechanism - extraction from associative memory. These
approaches are formed mainly on the basis of English verb morphology. Data on languages with
rich morphology are contradictive (see Gor, Chernigovskaya 2004; Gor 2010).
Here we present ERP-investigation of brain mechanisms for regular and irregular verbs inflection
on Russian material. The results demonstrate that in early time intervals inflection of regular and
irregular forms produce similar ERP changes. Differences between the two forms of verbs are
observed in ERP components, distributed between 600-850 ms, in central and temporal cortical
regions. Inflection of regular verbs is characterized by ERP positivity in this timeslot as compared to
ERP during inflection of irregular ones.
Observed ERP components can be associated with Late Positive Complex, Syntactic Positive Shift or
P600 (Kutas et al., 2006), which are related mainly to the syntactic and semantic operations with
sentences and considered as a reflection of general "conflict monitoring" during linguistic
processing (Alexandrov, Maksimova 2003). Observed ERP phenomenon in our case is interpreted
as a consequence of greater subjective complexity during inflection of irregular verbs and cannot
be treated in favor of modular approach. Such interpretation of results looks consistent with fMRIdata, obtained with a similar study design (Slioussar et al., under review).
Keywords: regular and irregular morphology, ERP, Russian