Electrophysiological evidence for the morpheme-based combinatoric processing of English compounds

Abstract

The extent to which the processing of compounds (e.g., “catfish”) makes recourse to morphological-level representations remains a matter of debate. Moreover, positing a morpheme-level route to complex word recognition entails not only access to morphological constituents, but also combinatoric processes operating on the constituent representations; however, the neurophysiological mechanisms subserving decomposition, and in particular morpheme combination, have yet to be fully elucidated. The current study presents electrophysiological evidence for the morpheme-based processing of both lexicalized (e.g., “teacup”) and novel (e.g., “tombnote”) visually-presented English compounds; these brain responses appear prior to and are dissociable from the eventual overt lexical decision response. The electrophysiological results reveal increased negativities for conditions with compound structure, including effects shared by lexicalized and novel compounds, as well as effects unique to each compound type, which may be related to aspects of morpheme combination. These findings support models positing across-the-board morphological decomposition, counter to models proposing that putatively complex words are primarily or solely processed as undecomposed representations, and motivate further electrophysiological research toward a more precise characterization of the nature and neurophysiological instantiation of complex word recognition.

Masked constituent priming of English compounds in native and non-native speakers

“…The second reason is that, being a (mostly unmediated) combination of free morphemes, most languages lack functional markers associated to compounding. This makes data from compounding studies showing rapid morphological decomposition particularly compelling, since parsing mechanisms cannot resort to affix detection on the basis of frequency and regularity (Fiorentino et al, 2014). Constituent priming effects have been reliably found in both overt (e.g., Libben, Gibson, Yoon, & Sandra, 2003;Sandra, 1990;Zwitserlood, 1994) and masked priming experiments (e.g., Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009;Fiorentino & FundReznicek, 2009;Shoolman & Andrews, 2003).…”

“…A simultaneous, multiple-route explanation is also possible: if, as Kuperman et al (2009) propose, whole-word frequency effects may already obtain before both constituents have been fixated, then a high-frequency first constituent should contribute to speeding up the processing of low-frequency compounds by pre-activating their full forms, any enhancement being attenuated if the number of compounds to activate is large. The absence of observable effects-either in frequency or family size-for the second constituent could then be taken as evidence that this is a matter of activation through partial recognition of whole-word forms, rather than composition per se (but see Fiorentino et al, 2014;Ji et al, 2011, for electrophysiological and behavioural evidence suggesting a vital role of the composition stage). To adjudicate between these theories, future work should gain temporal insight into the whole-word by first constituent frequency interaction.…”

“…More widespread use of experimental methodologies with high timescale resolution, such as eye-tracking, ERP and MEG measures (cf. Clahsen et al, 2013;Kuperman, 2013;Fiorentino et al, 2014;De Cat et al, 2015), may provide invaluable insight into the time course of access to morphological information in nonnative language processing, and allow us to further inspect whether any qualitative differences exist between native and nonnative speakers in their use and representation of morphology. We believe that most currently available evidence, including the data from the present experiment, points to the contrary.…”

“…The role constituent morphemes play in the access to, and representation of, complex words has been explored systematically for the last 40 years, from the seminal studies of Forster, 1975, 1976) to the proliferation of research contrasting behavioural, electrophysiological, neuroimaging and clinical data (e.g., Bozic, Marslen-Wilson, Stamatakis, Davis, & Tyler, 2007;Fiorentino, Naito-billen, Bost, & Fund-Reznicek, 2014;MacGregor & Shtyrov, 2013;Marelli, Zonca, Contardi, & Luzzatti, 2014; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 2007, among others). Current positions range from models advocating exclusively morpheme mediated access (Stockall & Marantz, 2006;Taft & Nillsen, 2013), to dual/multiple-route accounts highlighting the competition (and/or cooperation) between whole-form and morpheme-based access (Hyönä, 2012), to proposals questioning the role of morphology in favour of a distributed-connectionist implementation of unmediated access to constituent and whole-word meanings through orthographic and/or phonological cues (e.g., Devlin, Jamison, Matthews, & Gonnerman, 2004;Kuperman, 2013;Seidenberg & Gonnerman, 2000).…”

English compound and non-compound processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers: Effects of dominance and sequential multilingualism

“…A substantial body of evidence suggests that entries in the lexicon of native speakers include information on the word's morphemic structure, that is, the morphemes that combine to form the word (see, e.g., Fiorentino and Poeppel, 2007;Fiorentino et al, 2014;Stockall and Marantz, 2006;Taft and Forster, 1976, among many others; cf. Bybee, 1995;Kuperman, 2013).…”