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Breaking down prefixed words is unaffected by morphological boundary opacity: Evidence from behavioral and MEG
Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado1,2, Samantha Wray3, Marco Chia-Ho Lai4
1Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK. Dave.Cayado@rhul.ac.uk.
This study shows that the brain can break down complex words into their basic parts, even when the word parts are not clearly separated. This morphological decomposition is a flexible process in visual word recognition.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Linguistics
Background:
- Previous research suggests early visual word recognition involves morphological decomposition, breaking words into morphemes (e.g., "adorable" into "adore" + "able").
- Most studies focus on words with clear morpheme boundaries, leaving uncertainty about processing with obscured boundaries.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if obscured boundaries between prefixes and stems affect morphological decomposition.
- To examine the robustness and flexibility of early, form-based morphological decomposition.
Main Methods:
- Behavioral masked priming experiment to assess word processing.
- Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure neural activity during word recognition.
- Utilized Tagalog language with prefixed words exhibiting varying degrees of morphophonological changes.
Main Results:
- Behavioral data confirmed morphological decomposition occurs even with obscured {prefix}+{stem} boundaries.
- MEG data revealed neural activity modulated by stem:whole word transition probability, indicating decomposition.
- Morphophonological changes like nasal assimilation and substitution did not prevent morpheme recognition.
Conclusions:
- Early, form-based morphological decomposition is robust and flexible.
- The brain can recognize morphemes despite morphophonological changes that obscure the {prefix}+{stem} boundary.
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