Storage or decomposition in Dutch morphological processing: Arguments for the use of the MMN paradigm

Abstract

Research into the processing of morphologically complex words has yielded an extensive body of work over the last decades. However, still no consensus has been reached about the mechanisms involved. In Dutch, empirical evidence seems to contradict the predictions of most models. We will argue this is due to theoretical and methodological limitations of the models and the experiments that tested their predictions. After examining what is known and what remains to be investigated, we will propose the use of the mismatch negativity paradigm as a tool to tackle the remaining gaps in the study of Dutch morphological processing.