Neurophysiological Correlates of Morphosyntactic Processing

The study investigated cortical responses of young native French speaking schoolchildren during reading of short sentences including morphosyntactic violations in the verb inflection. In French, verbs of the first conjugation have homophonic inflection for the infinitive & past participle, This peculiarity is one of the main source of morphosyntactic errors in writing learners. To look for possible dissociation in the cortical responses to morphosyntactic violations, we compared in 15 schoolchildren (mean age: 10;1 years) the electrophysiological responses to morphological violations of verb inflection in verb with homophonic or heterophonic infinitive/past participle inflections. Our main findings concern the early left anterior negativity (ELAN), which is assumed to reflect the first-pass parsing & the left anterior negativity (LAN) corresponding to the integration of semantic & morphosyntactic information. These ERP's components appeared both sensitive to the violation in the inflection of verbs with heterophonic but not homophonic infinitive & past participle forms. Figures, References. Adapted from the source document