title: An Event-Related Potential Study of Cross-modal Morphological and Phonological Priming.
abstract: The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from sixteen healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately preceded present-tense targets. To minimize intra-modal phonological priming effects, cross-modal presentation between auditory primes and visual targets was employed, and results were compared to a companion intra-modal auditory study (Justus, Larsen, de Mornay Davies, & Swick, 2008). For both regular and irregular verbs, faster response times and reduced N400 components were observed for present-tense forms when primed by the corresponding past-tense forms. Although behavioral facilitation was observed with a pseudopast phonological control condition, neither this condition nor an orthographic-phonological control produced significant N400 priming effects. Instead, these two types of priming were associated with a post-lexical anterior negativity (PLAN). Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-system theories of inflectional morphology, as well as intra- and cross-modal prelexical priming.
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Service, Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Martinez, California.
authors.forename: Timothy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Justus
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Jary
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Larsen
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: de Mornay Davies
authors.forename: Diane
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Swick