Conclusion

This thesis presented results from several ERP studies that focused on the representation and processing of phonological stem variants of complex words.

In the first part of the dissertation, we presented research on the representation and processing of regular stem allomorphy involved in derivation.

More specifically, we investigated the cases of TSS in English and umlaut in German. The results of this series of studies provided experimental evidence in favor of unified representation of regular stem allomorphs. Experiments 1-4 demonstrated that allomorph misapplication in derivation could be structurally repaired as revealed in the attenuated N400 effect and LAN/LPN for RD items.

We argued that the structural repair process of the RD items proceeded via access to the unified lexical entry. Experiments 5-6, however, showed that the character of deviation from the standard, viz. morphosyntactic vs. purely phonological, did not matter, as long as the deviant items were presented in a biasing context and had a significant overlap with the expected words. The pilot study (Experiment 7) showed that low-proficiency L2 learners of German relied on the declarative memory in the acquisition of morphosyntactic rules.

In the second part of the thesis, we analyzed the representation and processing of irregular stem allomorphy focusing on German strong verbs.

Experiment 8 investigated the processing of excessively inflected and bare stem strong verbs in contrast to bare stem weak verbs in the past tense context.

Experiment 9 analyzed the processing of the same conditions in the present tense context. The results of these studies revealed differential representation of the weak and strong verbs. Furthermore, excessively inflected past tense allomorphs of strong verbs elicited violation effects only in the Past Context experiment. The bare stem strong verb condition, on the other hand, systematically triggered similar error-detection mechanisms independent of the temporal context. We argued that irregular stem allomorphs of German strong verbs were represented separately. Moreover, the bare present tense allomorphs were underspecified for tense, as reflected in the N400 effect. We also put forth the idea that bare stems could be perceived as the imperative mood. We suggested that the imperative mood should be semantically marked within the mental lexicon entry of the present tense allomorphs of strong verbs.

Based on the reported series of studies, two highly speculative models of representation of complex words were put forward. The first model (Figure 16) depicted a unified lexical entry for regular stem allomorphs that included a layer of morphophonological rules defining the surface form of an allomorph and a layer of morphosyntactic combinatory rules associated with a given surface form.

The second model (Figure 25) demonstrated representation of irregular stem allomorphy. Thus, each irregular allomorph of a strong verb should be represented separately on different subnodes. The basic allomorph carrying only verbal characteristics and underspecified for tense should be placed at the top.

The deeper subnodes should inherit the features from the upper nodes adding marked features. Therefore, the past tense allomorph should inherit the verbal characteristics from the basic stem and add the feature [+PRET]. Such manner of representation could capture regular stem vowel alternations that irregular stem allomorphs undergo within their paradigms (Figure 26). Furthermore, a present tense allomorph of a strong verb could contain a marked node for the imperative mood.

The findings of the present dissertation suggested directions for future research on the representation and processing of complex words. Thus, the notion of regularity should be revised and possibly extended to the domain of derivational morphology. A hybrid status of German strong verbs should be considered and accounted for by further studies. To validate the results of the present studies for a broader variety of regular processes, different derivational paradigms should be tested in both English and German. For example, the cases of immediate derivation involving a regular phonological change, such as tone/tonic and stark/Stärke (strong/strength), could be compared. It would also be

interesting to replicate the reported findings in the visual modality in order to control for the acoustically vs. cognitively triggered latency shifts. Further research is also necessary to explore the influence of context, both structural and semantic, on the processing of deviant input. We hope that the research reported in this thesis will provide a better understanding of the mental representation of language and of the mechanisms underlying natural speech processing.

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