title: Producing morphologically complex words: an ERP study with children and adults.
abstract: A widely studied morphological phenomenon in psycholinguistic research is the plurals-inside-compounds effect in English, which is the avoidance of regular plural modifiers within compounds (e.g., *rats hunter). The current study employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the production of plurals-inside-compounds in children and adults. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing morphologically complex words in 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds and adults, by recording ERPs during the silent production of compounds with plural or singular modifiers. Results for both children and adults revealed a negativity in response to compounds produced from regular plural forms when compared to compounds formed from irregular plurals, indicating a highly specific brain response to a subtle linguistic contrast. Although children performed behaviourally with an adult-like pattern in the task, we found a broader distribution and a considerably later latency in children's brain potentials than in adults', indicating that even in late childhood the brain networks involved in language processing are subject to subtle developmental changes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Centre for Brain Science, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
authors.forename: Mary-Jane
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Budd
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Centre for Brain Science, University of Essex, Colchester, UK. Electronic address: paulmann@essex.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Silke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Paulmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology & Centre for Brain Science, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Barry
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), University of Potsdam, Germany.
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Clahsen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male
keywords: ERPs; Language production; Linguistics; Morphology