Storage and processing of Dutch morphological information Early electrophysiological responses to lexical, morphological and syntactic information

The work in this dissertation aims at shedding new light on how humans store and process simple and complex words: electrophysiological responses elicited by native Dutch speakers are compared across linguistic contexts of monomorphemic, inflectional and derivational word processing, as well as syntactic agreement in gender and number.
The evoked responses are assumed, based on previously published results in languages like Finnish, German and English, to be sensitive to the strength of consolidation of specific linguistic memory traces, such that more consolidated memory traces would result in larger responses. Although statistical significance is seldom achieved, the results of these experiments shows that there is indeed a systematic difference in the responses evoked by simple and morphologically complex words. This, in turn, suggests that these two types of words engage different types of neurocognitive mechanisms for their storage in memory and their processing during language comprehension.
Despite the differences between simple and complex words observed in the studies of this book, the sensitivity of the neurophysiological response to the strength of consolidation of lexical memory traces is challenged in numerous ways in this study. This study shows a reversed surface-form frequency effect with singular and plural nouns and a lack of sensitivity to the syntactic agreement contexts of words. Both results challenge the basic assumptions behind the experimental paradigm used and raise the question of which cognitive operation underlie the responses evoked by this paradigm.