Morphological decomposition involving non-productive morphemes: ERP evidence

Abstract

It is generally believed that readers decompose a complex word into its constituent morphemes only when those morphemes participate productively in word formation. Here we recorded eventrelated potentials (ERPs) to words (e.g. mu¥er, receive), nonwords containing no morphemes (e.g. £ermuf), and non-words containing a pre¢x and a non-productive bound stem (e.g. in-ceive). Prior work has shown that pronounceable non-words elicit larger-amplitude N400 components than words. If readers treat non-words containing non-productive morphemes as unanalyzed wholes, then these non-words should elicit larger N400 s than matched words. We report here, however, that bound-stem nonwords elicit a brain response highly similar to that elicited by real words. This ¢nding suggests that morphological decomposition and representation extend to non-productive morphemes.

Model-generated lexical activity predicts graded ERP amplitudes in lexical decision

“…Previous studies revealed similar effects of lexicality (e.g., Carreiras et al, 2005;Hutzler et al, 2004;McKinnon et al, 2003). These studies also found larger negativities for nonwords compared to words starting at 300 ms.…”

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

“…the first sub-stage of word form encoding). In addition, the N400 effect has been found to be sensitive to morphological processing in visual word recognition/comprehension (McKinnon et al, 2003). ERP results obtained in the present study are consistent with the ones obtained in Koester and Schiller (2008) and Lensink et al (2014), as an increased amplitude value was found for morphologically primed target words in the latency range 400-550 ms poststimulus.…”

“…In Koester and Schiller (2008) and Lensink et al (2014), using the previously mentioned morphological priming task, the N400 amplitudes were reduced for the morphologically related condition compared to the unrelated one. This corresponds to the language comprehension literature, where evidence has been found that N400 amplitudes are sensitive to morphological processing (e.g., McKinnon et al, 2003). Further evidence comes from a study using intracranial recordings within Broca's area (Sahin et al, 2009) where participants were cued to inflect nouns and verbs.…”

“…A similar view is provided by distributed connectionist theories, where morphological effects arise from the convergence of orthographic and semantic similarity that is commonly found in morphologically related words (Plaut and Gonnerman, 2000;Seidenberg and McClelland, 1989). However, much evidence has accumulated supporting a decompositional view (Libben et al, 1999;McKinnon et al, 2003;Taft and Forster, 1975) where complex words are processed by access to and combination of their constituent morpheme representations e.g., {hot}þ{dog}. Some recent models combine features from full-listing and decompositional proposals (Baayen et al, 1997;Caramazza et al, 1988;Isel et al, 2003), assuming that morphologically complex words can either be recognized via a route using morphological parsing or via a direct route accessing morphologically complex words as full forms.…”

“…ERP evidence is in line with the behavioral results, revealing that amplitudes in the N400 range (400-550 ms after target picture onset) were less pronounced when preceded by a novel compound, relative to a familiar one. The reduced negativity is interpreted as N400 sensitivity to morphological processing (McKinnon et al, 2003;Schiller, 2008, 2011) that is increased with novelty.…”