Processing inflectional and derivational morphology: Electrophysiological evidence from Spanish

The goal of this paper is to study possible differences between the processing of inflectional vs. derivational morphology in Spanish word recognition using electrophysiological measures. A lexical decision task to target words preceded by morphological-related (or unrelated) primes was used. The orthographic and phonological overlap and the grammatical class for the two experimental conditions were exactly the same. Examples of the related conditions were, for inflection, NIÑO-NIÑA (“girl”-“boy”), and for derivation, RAMO-RAMA (“bunch”-“branch”). These conditions were compared with unrelated pairs without orthographic, phonological or semantic relationships. An attenuation of the N-400 component was found for both related conditions from 300 ms until 450 ms (until 500 ms for inflections only). In addition, different locations were suggested by the source analysis. These findings are consistent with accounts that argue for differences between the processing of inflections and derivations.

Research highlights▶ When a person is reading a word, does processing occur at a morphological level? ▶ The behavioral and neurocognitive evidence supports the idea of morphological processing. ▶ Are there differences between inflectional and derivational morphology? ▶ ERPs data suggest that the time course of the processing of both types of morphology is different. ▶ Different brain locations for the processing of inflectional and derivational morphology were found.