title: The production of nominal and verbal inflection in an agglutinative language: evidence from Hungarian.
abstract: The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in investigating the functional and neural architecture of language. However, most studies have examined the regular/irregular distinction in non-agglutinative Indo-European languages (primarily English) with relatively simple morphology. Additionally, the majority of research has focused on verbal rather than nominal inflectional morphology. The present study attempts to address these gaps by introducing both plural and past tense production tasks in Hungarian, an agglutinative non-Indo-European language with complex morphology. Here we report results on these tasks from healthy Hungarian native-speaking adults, in whom we examine regular and irregular nominal and verbal inflection in a within-subjects design. Regular and irregular nouns and verbs were stem on frequency, word length, and phonological structure, and both accuracy and response times were acquired. The results revealed that the regular/irregular contrast yields similar patterns in Hungarian, for both nominal and verbal inflection, as in previous studies of non-agglutinative Indo-European languages: the production of irregular inflected forms was both less accurate and slower than of regular forms, both for plural and past-tense inflection. The results replicate and extend previous findings to an agglutinative language with complex morphology. Together with previous studies, the evidence suggests that the regular/irregular distinction yields a basic behavioral pattern that holds across language families and linguistic typologies. Finally, the study sets the stage for further research examining the neurocognitive substrates of regular and irregular morphology in an agglutinative non-Indo-European language.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Dezso
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nemeth
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary; Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States of America.
authors.forename: Karolina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Janacsek
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Zsolt
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Turi
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Agnes
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lukacs
authors.affiliation: Department of English Language Teacher Education and Applied Linguistics, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
authors.forename: Don
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Peckham
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
authors.forename: Szilvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Szanka
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
authors.forename: Dorottya
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gazso
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
authors.forename: Noemi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Lovassy
authors.affiliation: Brain and Language Lab, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States of America.
authors.forename: Michael T
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Ullman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001519:Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006814:Hungary; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult