Probing early lexical and morphological processing in Dutch with the MMN response: Different responses to morphologically simple and complex words in Dutch

The past tense inflection has been a popular phenomenon to study the representational status of morphologically complex words. While several experiments in the processing of past tense verbs across languages have shown these verbs are stored via their constituent morphemes, experiments in the processing of the Dutch past tense indicate that these words are lexically stored in their surface form and therefore not decomposed. However, the experiments in Dutch past tense processing have not made use of experimental paradigms that can tap the earliest stages of word processing, where some theories predict decomposition would take place. We used the mismatch negativity response to study the representational status of monomorphemic and morphologically complex Dutch words. We were able to obtain different responses for monomorphemic and morphologically complex words, suggesting these are processed by different mechanisms. We cannot, however, discard the possibility that some past tense forms in Dutch do have surface form representations.