Word accents and morphology - ERPs of Swedish word processing

Results are presented which indicate that high stem tones realizing word accents activate a certain class of suffixes in on-line processing of Central Swedish. This supports the view that high Swedish word accent tones are induced onto word stems by particular suffixes rather than being associated with words in the mental lexicon. Using Event-Related Potentials, effects of mismatch between word accents and inflectional suffixes were compared with mismatches between stem and suffix in terms of declension class. Declensionally incorrect suffixes yielded an increase in the N400, indicating problems in lexical retrieval, as well as a P600 effect, showing reanalysis. Both declensionally correct and incorrect high tone-inducing (Accent 2) suffixes combined with a mismatching low tone (Accent 1) on the stems produced P600 effects, but did not increase the N400. Suffixes usually co-occurring with Accent 1 did not yield any effects in words realized with the non-matching Accent 2, suggesting that Accent 1 is a default accent, lacking association with any particular suffix. High tones on Accent 2 words also produced an early anterior positivity, interpreted as a P200 effect reflecting pre-attentive processing of the tone