The Interaction Between Storage and Computation in Morphosyntactic Processing

Morris, Jeffrey B.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-7325-5_3

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Wei and colleagues employed a lexical decision task, and observed a LAN effect in comparing Mandarin compounds and simplex forms with a variety of parts-of-speech. Our current study extends and strengthens their findings, as the results of isolated-word paradigms do not always agree with the processing dynamics observed when the same items are embedded in sentential contexts (see Morris, 2017). Mirroring this point, a recent MEG study on auditory word processing revealed different neural substrates when words are processed in isolation vs. in continuous speech (Gaston et al, 2022).…”

Section: A Lan Effect For Mandarin Noun Compounds Relative To Simplex...supporting

confidence: 59%

Shared neural computations for syntactic and morphological structures: evidence from Mandarin Chinese

Yu,

Mancha,

Tian

et al. 2024

Preprint

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What are syntactic relations, and how does our brain infer them from a string of text characters? In the EEG study reported here we aimed to investigate these questions by contrasting syntactically separable compounds (zao4...fan3 -> 'rebel') and non-separable compounds (chi2yi2 -> 'hesitate') in Mandarin Chinese. Because both kinds of compounds have non-compositional meanings, their syntactic differences provide an elegant means for dissociating syntactic from semantic relations. Because non-separable compounds fit the traditional criteria for 'wordhood', this contrast also provides a means for asking whether syntactic and morphological relations are inferred in qualitatively different ways. We found that, relative to non-separable compounds, syntactically separable compounds elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) effect between 275-400ms. Even though readers were always presented with the compounds in their unseparated form, our results suggest that the potentially separable compound forms drive the inference of a more complex set of underlying syntactic relations. In a companion manipulation in the same participants, we observed a qualitatively similar LAN effect when comparing non-separable compound nouns with simplex nouns. This finding raises doubts for the existence of a clear-cut distinction between 'syntax' and 'morphology', at least in processing.

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Section: A Lan Effect For Mandarin Noun Compounds Relative To Simplex...supporting

confidence: 59%