The Production of Nominal and Verbal Inflection in an Agglutinative Language: Evidence from Hungarian

Németh, Dezső and Janacsek, Karolina and Turi, Z. and Lukács, Ágnes and Peckham, Donald William (2015) The Production of Nominal and Verbal Inflection in an Agglutinative Language: Evidence from Hungarian. PLOS ONE, 10 (3). e0119003. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in in- vestigating 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 at- tempts 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 phonolog- ical 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 irregu- lar morphology in an agglutinative non-Indo-European language.

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