Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-rdgjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T05:03:48.384Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Neurophysiological Evidence for Morphological Underspecification in German Strong Adjective Inflection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Andreas Opitz ,
Gereon Müller ,
Stefanie Regel  and
Angela D. Friederici
Andreas Opitz*
Affiliation:
Institut für Linguistik
Gereon Müller*
Affiliation:
Institut für Linguistik
Stefanie Regel*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Angela D. Friederici*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
*
Institut für Linguistik, Universität Leipzig Beethovenstr. 15, 04107 Leipzig, Germany [andreas.opitz@uni-leipzig.de] [gereon.mueller@uni-leipzig.de]
Institut für Linguistik, Universität Leipzig Beethovenstr. 15, 04107 Leipzig, Germany [andreas.opitz@uni-leipzig.de] [gereon.mueller@uni-leipzig.de]
Department of Neuropsychology, Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences [regel@cbs.mpg.de] [angelafr@cbs.mpg.de]
Department of Neuropsychology, Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences [regel@cbs.mpg.de] [angelafr@cbs.mpg.de]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the present study we investigate the relevance of the concept of underspecified inflection markers for the processing of language in the human brain. Underspecification is recognized as the main source of syncretism in many current morphological theories. However, relatively little is known about its cognitive status. In underspecification-based theories, a competition among morphological exponents arises systematically. In order to win such a competition, an inflection marker has to meet two requirements: compatibility and specificity. If underspecification is real, these two principles should also be an inherent part of the language processing system. One should therefore be able to observe separable effects for the violation of each of the criteria. We used the event-related potential (ERP) violation paradigm to test this hypothesis in the domain of strong adjective inflection in German. We expected differences in brain potentials between two incorrect conditions whenever they represented different types of violation (of compatibility and specificity). Our findings strongly support underspecification: an ERP-component related to morphosyntactic integration (viz. left anterior negativity; LAN) was modulated by violations of specificity versus compatibility. Furthermore, the neurophysiological evidence helps to distinguish between two kinds of morphological underspecification that have been proposed: it argues for maximal rather than minimal underspecification. Finally, the observed brain responses indicate increased processing demands for highly specific markers, which suggests that LAN effects may be sensitive not only to morphosyntactic violations but also to the degree of processing effort.

Keywords

underspecificationevent-related potential (ERP)left anterior negativity (LAN)distributed morphologysyncretismgendersubset (elsewhere, blocking, Pāṇini's) principle

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 231 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Anderson, Stephen. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bader, Markus, and Meng, Michael. 1999. Subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses: An across-the-board comparison. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28. 121–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baerman, Matthew, Brown, Dunstan; and Corbett, Greville G.. 2005. The syntax-morphology interface: A study of syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486234CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bierwisch, Manfred. 1967. Syntactic features in morphology: General problems of so-called pronominal inflection in German. To honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, 239–70. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Blevins, James P. 1995. Syncretism and paradigmatic opposition. Linguistics and Philosophy 18. 113–52.10.1007/BF00985214CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina, and Schlesewsky, Matthias. 2008. An alternative perspective on semantic P600 effects in language comprehension. Brain Research Reviews 59. 55–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Butterworth, Brian. 1983. Lexical representation. Language production, vol. 2: Development, writing and other language processes, ed. by Butterworth, Brian, 257–94. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Caramazza, Alfonso, Laudanna, Alessandro; and Romani, Cristina. 1988. Lexical access and inflectional morphology. Cognition 28. 297–332.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, Noam. 2005. Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 1–22.10.1162/0024389052993655CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, Harald, Eisenbeiss, Sonja, Hadler, Meike; and Sonnenstuhl, Ingrid. 2001. The mental representation of inflected words: An experimental study of adjectives and verbs in German. Language 77. 510–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, Harald, Sonnenstuhl, Ingrid; and Blevins, James P.. 2003. Derivational morphology in the German mental lexicon: A dual mechanism account. Morphological structure in language processing, ed. by Baayen, R. Harald and Schreuder, Robert, 125–55. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville G., and Fraser, Norman. 1993. Network morphology: A DATR account of Russian nominal inflection. Journal of Linguistics 29. 113–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Di Sciullo, Anna Maria, and Williams, Edwin. 1987. On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Peter. 2000. Grundriß der deutschen Grammatik, Band 1: Das Wort. Stuttgart: Metzler.Google Scholar
Embick, David. 2003. Locality, listedness, and morphological identity. Studia Linguistica 57. 143–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanselow, Gisbert. 1991. Minimale Syntax. Passau: Universität Passau Habilitation thesis.Google Scholar
Fraser, Norman, and Corbett, Greville G.. 1994. Gender, animacy, and declensional class assignment: A unified account for Russian. Yearbook of Morphology 1994. 123–50.Google Scholar
Friederici, Angela. 2002. Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6. 78–84.10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01839-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friederici, Angela, Hahne, Anja; and Saddy, Douglas. 2002. Distinct neurophysiological patterns reflecting aspects of syntactic complexity and syntactic repair. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 31. 1. 45–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
FriedeRici, Angela, Mecklinger, Axel, Spencer, Kevin m., Steinhauer, Karsten; and Donchin, Emanuel. 2001. Syntactic parsing preferences and their on-line revisions: A spatio-temporal analysis of event-related brain potentials. Cognitive Brain Research 11. 2. 305–23.10.1016/S0926-6410(00)00065-3CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friederici, Angela, and Meyer, Martin. 2004. The brain knows the difference: Two types of grammatical violations. Brain Research 1000. 72–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friederici, Angela, Pfeifer, Erdmut; and Hahne, Anja. 1993. Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: Effects of semantic, morphological and syntactic violations. Cognitive Brain Research 1. 183–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friederici, Angela d., and Weissenborn, Jürgen. 2007. Mapping sentence form onto meaning: The syntax-semantics interface. Brain Research 1146. 50–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuß, Eric. 2005. The rise of agreement. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallmann, Peter. 2004. Feature sharing in DPs. Explorations in nominal inflection, ed. by Müller, Gereon, Gunkel, Lutz, and Zifonun, Gisela, 121–60. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele e. 2006. Constructions at work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, Jane. 2001. Optimal clitic positions and the lexicon in Romance clitic systems. Optimality-theoretic syntax, ed. by Legendre, Géraldine, Grimshaw, Jane, and Vikner, Sten, 205–40. Cambridge, MA: Mit Press.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris. 1997. Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics (Papers at the interface) 30. 425–49.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris, and Marantz, Alec. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. The view from Building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, ed. by Hale, Kenneth and Keyser, Samuel Jay, 111–76. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi. 2001. Lecture 11: Distributed morphology: Halle & Marantz & Potawatomi inflection. Lecture 11: Distributed morphology: Halle & Marantz & Potawatomi inflection: University of Arizona, ms. Online: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/hharley/courses/ABRALIN/Lecture2Processes.pdf.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi, and Noyer, Rolf. 2003. Distributed morphology. The second GLOT International state-of-the-article book: The latest in linguistics, ed. by Cheng, Lisa and Sybesma, Rint, 463–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1962a. Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre: Gesamtbedeutungen der russischen Kasus. Selected writings, vol. 2, 23–71. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1962b. Morfologičeskije nabljudenija. Selected writings, vol. 2, 154–81. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Janssen, Ulrike, and Penke, Martina. 2002. How are inflectional affixes organized in the mental lexicon? Evidence from the investigation of agreement errors in agrammatic aphasics. Brain and Language 81. 180–91.10.1006/brln.2001.2516CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaan, Edith. 2007. Event-related potentials and language processing: A brief overview. Language and Linguistics Compass 1. 571–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Albert, and Osterhout, Lee. 2005. The independence of combinatory semantic processing: Evidence from event-related potentials. Journal of Memory and Language 52. 205–25.10.1016/j.jml.2004.10.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Jonathan w., and Kutas, Marta. 1995. Who did what and when? Using word- and clause-level ERPs to monitor working memory usage in reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 7. 3. 376–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. ‘Elsewhere’ in phonology. A festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by Anderson, Stephen R. and Kiparsky, Paul, 93–106. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kluender, Robert, and Kutas, Marta. 1993. Bridging the gap: Evidence from ERPs on the processing of unbounded dependencies. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 5. 2. 196215.10.1162/jocn.1993.5.2.196CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lumsden, John. 1992. Underspecification in grammatical and natural gender. Linguistic Inquiry 23. 469–86.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, William. 2007. Morphological processes in language comprehension. Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, ed. by Gaskell, Gareth, 175–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mecklinger, Axel, Schriefers, Herbert, Steinhauer, Karsten; and Friederici, Angela d.. 1995. Processing relative clauses varying on syntactic and semantic dimensions: An analysis with event-related potentials. Memory and Cognition 23. 477–95.10.3758/BF03197249CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Müller, Gereon. 2002. Remarks on nominal inflection in German. More than words: A festschrift for Dieter Wunderlich, ed. by Kaufmann, Ingrid and Stiebels, Barbara, 113–45. Berlin: Akademie.Google Scholar
Müller, Gereon. 2007. Notes on paradigm economy. Morphology 17. 1–38.10.1007/s11525-007-9114-xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Gereon. 2008. Review of Baerman et al. 2005. Word Structure 1. 199–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Münte, Thomas F., Schiltz, Kolja; and Kutas, Marta. 1998. When temporal terms belie conceptual order. Nature 395. 6697. 71–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neville, Helen J., Nicol, Janet F., Barss, Andrew, Forster, Kenneth I.; and Garrett, Merril F.. 1991. Syntactically based sentence processing classes: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3. 2. 151–65.10.1162/jocn.1991.3.2.151CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noyer, Rolf. 1992. Features, positions, and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Noyer, Rolf. 1997. Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Penke, Martine, Janssen, Ulrike; and Eisenbeiss, Sonja. 2004. Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features. Brain and Language 90. 42333.10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00453-XCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pertsova, Katya. 2007. Learning form-meaning mappings in presence of homonymy: A linguistically motivated model of learning inflection. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven. 1991. Rules of language. Science 253. 530–35.10.1126/science.1857983CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Regel, Stefanie, Gunter, Thomas C.; and Friederici, Angela D.. 2011. Isn't it ironic? An electrophysiological exploration of figurative language processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23. 2. 277–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rossi, Sonja, Gugler, Manfred F., Hahne, Anja; and Friederici, Angela D.. 2005. When word category information encounters morphosyntax: An ERP study. Neuroscience Letters 384. 3. 228–33.10.1016/j.neulet.2005.04.077CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sauerland, Uli. 1996. The late insertion of Germanic inflection. The late insertion of Germanic inflection: MIT, ms.Google Scholar
Schlesewsky, Matthias, Fanselow, Gisbert, Kliegl, Reinhold; and Krems, Josef. 2000. The subject preference in the processing of locally ambiguous wh-questions in German. German sentence processing, ed. by Hemforth, Barbara and Konieczny, Lars, 6593. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Schriefers, Herbert. 1999. Morphology and word recognition. Language comprehension: A biological perspective, 2nd edn., ed. by Friederici, Angela D., 101–32. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Schriefers, Herbert, Friederici, Angela D.; and Kühn, Katja. 1995. The processing of locally ambiguous relative clauses in German. Journal of Memory and Language 34. 499–520.10.1006/jmla.1995.1023CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stolterfoht, Britta, Gese, Helga; and Maienborn, Claudia. 2010. Word category conversion causes processing costs: Evidence from adjectival passives. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 17. 651–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486333CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taft, Marcus, and Forster, Kenneth. 1975. Lexical storage and retrieval of prefixed words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 4. 638–47.Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Trommer, Jochen. 2001. Distributed optimality. Potsdam: Universität Potsdam dissertation.Google Scholar
Trommer, Jochen. 2005. Markiertheit und Verarmung. Paper presented at the Honorary Doctorate Colloquium for Manfred Bierwisch, Universität Leipzig.Google Scholar
Trommer, Jochen. 2006. Person and number agreement in Dumi. Linguistics 44. 1011–57.10.1515/LING.2006.033CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiese, Bernd. 1996. Iconicity and syncretism: On pronominal inflection in Modern German. Theoretical linguistics and grammatical description, ed. by Sackmann, Robin and Budde, Monika, 323–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wiese, Bernd. 1999. Unterspezifizierte Paradigmen: Form und Funktion in der pronominalen Deklination. Linguistik Online 4. Online: http://www.linguistik-online.de/3_99.10.13092/lo.4.1034CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Edwin. 1994. Remarks on lexical knowledge. Lingua 92. 7–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Edwin. 1997. Blocking and anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 28. 577–628.Google Scholar
Wunderlich, Dieter. 1996. Minimalist morphology: The role of paradigms. Yearbook of Morphology 1995. 93–114.10.1007/978-94-017-3716-6_6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wunderlich, Dieter. 1997a. Der unterspezifizierte Artikel. Sprache im Fokus, ed. by Dürscheid, Christa, Ramers, Karl H., and Schwarz, Monika, 47–55. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Wunderlich, Dieter. 1997b. A minimalist model of inflectional morphology. The role of economy principles in linguistic theory, ed. by Wilder, Chris, Gärtner, Hans-Martin, and Bierwisch, Manfred, 267–98. Berlin: Akademie.Google Scholar
Wunderlich, Dieter. 2004. Is there any need for the concept of directional syncretism? Explorations in nominal inflection, ed. by Müller, Gereon, Gunkel, Lutz, and Zifonun, Gisela, 373–95. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Zifonun, Gisela. 2001. Grammatik des Deutschen im europäischen Vergleich: Das Pronomen. Teil 1: Überblick und Personalpronomen. (Amades working paper 4/01.) Mannheim: Institut für Deutsche Sprache.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Opitz et al. supplementary material

Opitz et al. supplementary material
Download Opitz et al. supplementary material(File)
File 3.2 MB