ERP Evidence of Morphological Analysis from Orthography: A Masked Priming Study

Abstract

There is broad consensus that the visual word recognition system is sensitive to morphological structure (e.g., “hunter” = “hunt” + “er”). Moreover, it has been assumed that the analysis of morphologically complex words (e.g., “hunter”) occurs only if the meaning of the complex form can be derived from the meanings of its constituents (e.g., “hunt” and “er”). However, recent behavioral work using masked priming has suggested that morphological analysis can occur at an early, orthographic level, with little influence from semantics. The present investigation examined the neurophysiological correlates of masked priming in conditions of a genuine morphological relationship (e.g., “hunter”-“HUNT”), an apparent morphological relationship (“corner”-“CORN”), and no morphological relationship (“brothel”-“BROTH”). Neural priming was indexed by the reduction of the N400 ERP component associated with targets preceded by related primes, as compared to targets preceded by unrelated primes. The mere appearance of morphological structure (“corner”-“CORN”) resulted in robust behavioral and neural priming, whose magnitude was similar to that observed in pairs with genuine morphological relationship and greater than that in the nonmorphological pairs. The results support a purely structural morphemic segmentation procedure operating in the early stages of visual word perception.

Processing differences across regular and irregular inflections revealed through ERPs.

“…This 'form-then-meaning' time-course is consistent with the temporal characterisation of the recognition of printed derived forms uncovered in previous research (e.g. Crepaldi et al, 2010;Lavric et al, 2007Lavric et al, , 2012Rastle et al, 2004). We believe that these data support the particular theory developed by Crepaldi et al (2010), which is based on the classical localist modelling tradition exemplified in work on speech production (e.g.…”

“…Crepaldi et al, 2010;Lavric et al, 2007Lavric et al, , 2012Rastle et al, 2004). Further, this study adds to a remarkably consistent picture of the precise timing of the proposed morpho-orthographic segmentation process.…”

“…Crepaldi et al, Lavric et al, 2007Lavric et al, , 2011Longtin et al, 2003;McCormick et al, 2008;Rastle et al, 2004). This pattern is also true in ERP measures of masked priming, where morphological priming is reliably distinguished from orthographic priming (Lavric et al, 2007).…”

Morphological priming in overt language production: Electrophysiological evidence from Dutch

“…Taft and Forster, 1975). For example, Lavric et al (2007) reported comparable priming effects for pairs of words that were morphologically related (e.g. cleaner -clean) and pairs that only superficially had a morphological relation (e.g.…”

“…Other behavioral studies and the use of event-related potentials (ERPs) have questioned this theoretical view (e.g. Longtin et al, 2003;Rastle et al, 2004;Barber et al, 2002;Domínguez et al, 2004;Lavric et al, 2007).…”