Distinct morphological processing of recently learned compound words: An ERP study

Abstract

EEG Morphology N400Overt speech Priming a b s t r a c t Our vocabulary is, at least in principle, infinite. We can create new words combining existing ones in meaningful ways to form new linguistic expressions. The present study investigated the morphological processing of novel compound words in overt speech production. Native speakers of Dutch learned a series of new compounds (e.g. appelgezicht, 'apple-face') that were later used as primes in a morphological priming task. In this protocol, primes were compound words morphologically related to a target's picture name (e.g. appelgezicht was used for a picture of an apple, Dutch appel). The novel primes were compared with corresponding familiar compounds sharing a free morpheme (e.g. appelmoes, 'applesauce') and with unrelated compounds. Participants were required to read aloud words and to name pictures in a long-lag design. Behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) data were collected in two sessions, separated by 48 h. Clear facilitation of picture naming latencies was obtained when pictures were paired with morphological related words. Notably, our results show that novel compounds have a stronger priming effect than familiar compounds in both sessions, which is expressed in a marked reduction in target naming latencies and a decrease in the N400 amplitude. These results suggest that participants focused more on the separate constituents when reading novel primes than in the case of existing compounds.

Reactive control in evaluating appropriately or inappropriately novel ideas: Evidence from electrophysiological measures

“…First, perceptual conflicts between externally given solutions (strokes) and internally generated ideas (radicals) will certainly lead to semantic conflicts because the radicals convey phonological and semantic information of characters (Zou et al, 2019). Although the classical N400 component tends to have a centroparietal scalp distribution (Lau et al, 2014), it is sensitive to semantic violations in appreciating novel words (Bakker et al, 2015), novel compound words (Kaczer et al, 2015), novel associations (Lin & Yang, 2014), and novel metaphors (Obert et al, 2018). Second, Chinese characters are typical hieroglyphs, and compared with radical‐level decomposition, stroke‐level decomposition breaks the orthographic rules of characters to a greater extent.…”

Contrasting dynamics of memory consolidation for novel word forms and meanings revealed by behavioral and neurophysiological markers

“…Fernandes, Kolinsky, and Ventura (2009) found evidence for lexical integration of word-forms in the context of artificial language learning immediately after training. Besides, Kaczer et al, (2015) found morphological priming for recently learned compound words. In the same vein, De Diego Balaguer et al (2007) found evidence for ERP changes in a word and rule learning experiment after only a four-minute exposure to an artificial language.…”

Unsupervised Text Segmentation Predicts Eye Fixations During Reading

“…In a recent review, Leminen et al ( 2019 ) analyzed more than 100 neuroimaging studies of inflected words (e.g., walk-ed), derived words (e.g., dark-ness), and compounds (e.g., walk-man). As they summarized, most studies of the processing of derivational/inflectional morphology agree that such complex words are decomposed during processing; but studies of the processing of compound words show inconsistent results: some support the access of constituent morpheme units (Koester and Schiller, 2011 ; Fiorentino et al, 2014 ), some support the access of whole-word units (Stites et al, 2016 ), and some support mixed access of both (MacGregor and Shtyrov, 2013 ; Kaczer et al, 2015 ; Yang et al, 2020a ).…”