0000000000548856

AUTHOR

Alina Leinonen

Event-related potential (ERP) responses to violations of inflectional and derivational rules of Finnish

Event-related potentials (ERP) were used to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of inflectional and derivational morphology. The participants were presented with visual sentences containing critical words in which either inflectional, derivational or both rules (combined violation) of Finnish were violated. Inflectional anomalies violated a number agreement of a noun with a previous auxiliary word. Derivational violations included a word-internal selectional restriction violation, i.e., a root and suffix category violation. Combined violations contained both a number and a category violation. The phonemic length of the critical words was controlled. Inflectional violations elici…

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Neurocognitive processing of auditorily and visually presented inflected words and pseudowords: Evidence from a morphologically rich language

The aim of the study was to investigate how the input modality affects the processing of a morphologically complex word. The processing of Finnish inflected vs. monomorphemic words and pseudowords was examined during a lexical decision task, using behavioral responses and event-related potentials. The stimuli were presented in two modalities, visually and auditorily, to two groups of participants. Half of the words and pseudowords carried a case-inflection. At the behavioral level, the inflected words elicited a processing cost with longer decision latencies and higher error rates. At the neural level, pseudowords elicited an N400 effect, which was more pronounced in the visual modality. In…

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Case Distribution and Nominalization: Evidence from Finnish

.  In many languages, case is distributed among many grammatical elements inside of argument DPs. This article shows that case distribution in Finnish is sensitive to certain nontrivial structural properties of those DPs. This makes it possible to use case distribution as a tool to investigate the internal structure of a variety of DPs, including nominalized clauses. It is argued, based on such new evidence, that (i) there exists a syntactic nominalizer head n within various kinds of nominal phrases, and that (ii) genitive argument DPs of nominalized clauses undergo raising analogous to the EPP-triggered DP raising in finite clauses. Furthermore, these genitive arguments are base-generated …

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