Poster D53, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
ERP responses to simple vs. complex English morphology in native Mandarin speakers
Chu-Hsuan Kuo1, Lee Osterhout1;1University of Washington
Much of neurolinguistics research has attempted to clarify the factors that influence the acquisition of a second language. Chinese, unlike English, has very little morphology, which presents a linguistic contrast between the two languages. Using event-related potentials, we investigated whether native Mandarin speakers can acquire English morphology to the same degree as native English speakers. Twenty-eight native Mandarin speakers who first arrived in the United States to attend college were recruited to complete a sentence judgment task consisting of English sentences that were either well-formed or grammatically ill-formed, in which the critical word was either morphologically simple or complex. Analyses revealed no main effects but an interaction between grammaticality and morphological complexity, such that the P600 amplitude was significantly larger for ungrammatical simple stimuli but was absent for ungrammatical complex stimuli. This contrasts with prior work showing larger P600 amplitudes for ungrammatical complex stimuli in native English speakers. The present findings cannot be explained as a function of accuracy, as accuracy was comparable between the simple and complex stimuli. Our results suggest that native Mandarin speakers may be able to learn English morphology but have difficulty acquiring native-like brain responses to complex morphological grammatical errors.
Themes: Multilingualism, Morphology
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)