The production of nominal and verbal inflection in an agglutinative language: evidence from Hungarian

The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in investigating 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 attempts 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 phonological 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 irregular morphology in an agglutinative non-Indo-European language

On the dynamics of the cholestane spin probe in a nematic azobenzene side group oligomer

ESR studies were carried out on the rotational dynamics of the cholestane spin probe dissolved in a nematic methacrylate oligomer containing azobenzene side groups from well above T-NI to below T-g. Only one molecular site was detected in contrast to analogous high molar mass samples, for which distributions of molecular sites were found depending on their thermal histories. The probe dynamics was coupled to that of either the methacrylate main chain or the azobenzene side groups in different temperature regions

Nanoscale heterogeneities in nematic azobenzene polymethacrylates for optical nanowriting

ESR studies of the rotational dynamics of the cholestane spin probe dissolved in nematic azobenzene polymethacrylates from above TNI to below Tg are presented. Different dynamic regimes were recognized, in which the molecular sites or distributions of molecular sites were populated depending on the structure of the polymers and their thermal histories. We highlight the significance of such spatialtemporal nanoscale heterogeneities in view of possible application of the azobenzene polymers in erasable optical nanowriting