How Dutch and Turkish-Dutch readers process morphologically complex words: An ERP study

To examine time-course differences between regularly and irregularly inflected, and productively and non-productively derived words, native Dutch speakers and Turkish-Dutch early bilinguals performed a visual lexical decision task combined with electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. Target items were presented in two types of nonword contexts to examine the effects of stimulus list composition and language background. We found similar negative brain responses for regularly and irregularly inflected words, and for productively and non-productively derived words, in the 200–350 ms time window for both participant groups. In the 350-500 ms time window, most negative brain responses were observed for the irregularly inflected verbs. We suggest that the negativities found in the 200-350 ms time window reflect early, form-based processing of complex words. In the 350-500 ms time window, this processing is affected by a discrepancy between orthography and morphology. Different results for the Dutch and Turkish-Dutch speakers in the nonword contexts show that, due to their language background, decomposition is more automatized in Turkish-Dutch speakers. Their processing strategy is thus less affected by the manipulation of stimulus list composition. In contrast, decomposition in our Dutch speakers is less automatized and thus more sensitive to the structure of nonwords