An ER-fMRI study of Russian inflectional morphology

• We compare single vs. dual system models of inflectional morphology using fMRI.
• Previous neuroimaging studies rely mostly on English and German, we use Russian.
• This is the first fMRI study of Russian morphology, verbs and nouns are analyzed.
• Our findings are more readily compatible with the single-system approach
• We suggest a processing load explanation for observed activation patterns.

The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has long been a testing ground for different models of inflection in the mental lexicon. Behavioral studies examined a variety of languages, but neuroimaging studies rely almost exclusively on English and German data. In our fMRI experiment, participants inflected Russian verbs and nouns of different types and corresponding nonce stimuli. Irregular real and nonce verbs activated inferior frontal and inferior parietal regions more than regular verbs did, while no areas were more activated in the opposite comparison. We explain this activation pattern by increasing processing load: a parametric contrast revealed that these regions are also more activated for nonce stimuli compared to real stimuli. A very similar pattern is found for nouns. Unlike most previously obtained results, our findings are more readily compatible with the single-system approach to inflection, which does not postulate a categorical difference between regular and irregular forms.