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Morphological decomposition involving non-productive morphemes: ERP evidence
Richard McKinnon1, Mark Allen, Lee Osterhout
1Department of Linguistics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Neuroreport
|July 15, 2003
Summary
Readers decompose words into meaningful parts, even when those parts are not actively used in new word creation. This study reveals that the brain processes non-productive morphemes similarly to real words, suggesting broader morphological analysis.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Readers typically decompose complex words into morphemes during language processing.
- It was previously assumed this decomposition only occurs for productive morphemes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether readers decompose words with non-productive morphemes.
- To examine the brain's response to non-words containing non-productive morphemes.
Main Methods:
- Recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to real words, non-words without morphemes, and non-words with non-productive morphemes.
- Compared the N400 component amplitude across these stimuli.
Main Results:
- Non-words containing non-productive bound stems elicited an N400 response similar to real words.
- This contrasts with pronounceable non-words without morphemes, which showed larger N400 amplitudes.
Conclusions:
- Morphological decomposition and representation extend to non-productive morphemes.
- The brain's word processing mechanisms are more flexible than previously thought regarding morpheme productivity.