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

Németh, Dezső

Janacsek, Karolina

Turi, Z.

Lukács, Ágnes

Peckham, Donald William

2015

PH04 Hungarian language and literature / magyar nyelv és irodalom

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.

Article

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http://real.mtak.hu/34400/1/Nemeth_The_Production_of_Nomina...

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

http://real.mtak.hu/34400/