Morphological priming in overt language production: Electrophysiological evidence from Dutch

Abstract

a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f oThe present study investigated morphological priming in Dutch and its time course in overt speech production using a long-lag priming paradigm. Prime words were compounds that were morphologically related to a picture name (e.g. the word jaszak, 'coat pocket' was used for a picture of a coat; Dutch jas) or form-related monomorphemic words (e.g. jasmijn, 'jasmine'). The morphologically related compounds could be semantically transparent (e.g. eksternest, 'magpie nest') or opaque (e.g. eksteroog, lit. 'magpie eye', 'corn', for a picture of a magpie, Dutch ekster). Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data were collected in two sessions. The production of morphologically related and complex words facilitated subsequent picture naming and elicited a reduced N400 compared with unrelated prime words. The effects did not differ for transparent and opaque relations. Mere form overlap between a prime word and a target picture name did not affect picture naming. These results extend previous findings from German to another language and demonstrate the feasibility of measuring cognitive ERP components during overt speech. Furthermore, the results suggest that morphological priming in language production cannot be reduced to semantic and phonological processing. The time course of these priming effects as reflected in the ERP measure is in accordance with a meta-analytic temporal estimate of morphological encoding in speaking [Indefrey, P., & Levelt, W.J.M. (2004). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components. Cognition, 92, suggesting that morphological relations are encoded at the word form level.

Comparing Electrophysiological Correlates of Word Production in Immediate and Delayed Naming Through the Analysis of Word Age of Acquisition Effects

“…Only a few studies used overt production (immediate picture naming), with MEG (Levelt, Praamstra, Meyer, Helenius, & Salmelin, 1998;Maess, Friederici, Damian, Meyer, & Levelt, 2002) or with EEG (Eulitz, Hauk, & Cohen, 2000;Koester & Schiller, 2008;Strijkers et al, 2009).…”

“…It should be emphasised however that even ERP studies using an overt production paradigm and analysing epochs relative to picture onset might be missing these encoding processes, especially when the response onset exceeds the time-window considered in the analyses. In fact, in these overt production studies stimulus-aligned epochs have been analysed with a time-period varying from 500 ms (Maess et al, 2002) to 700 ms after picture onset (Koester & Schiller, 2008) in order to avoid artefacts due to motor execution. For instance, in the study by Strijkers et al (2009) the time-window of the analysed ERP was chosen in order to stop 100 ms before the fastest response latency.…”

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

“…Thus, very frequently used compounds (e.g., 'airport') and opaque ones (e.g., 'butterfly') are supposedly stored in their full form whereas less frequent compounds would be decomposed and their constituents' meaning needs to be combined. In a previous study using morphological priming in overt speech with existing compounds (Koester and Schiller, 2008) full-parsing and dual-route models (Badecker, 2001;Levelt et al, 1999;Taft, 2004) were proposed to account for the data, suggesting that morphemes might be planning units in language production (Roelofs, 2002). In the present work, novel compound words were formed by combining two existing morphemes (e.g.…”

“…In contrast, relatively little is known about the neuro-cognitive correlates of compound production. 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).…”

“…In Koester and Schiller (2008), using morphological priming in overt speech, ERPs were used to test more directly whether morphological priming originates at the word form level. They report an onset of the N400 effect that is similar to the estimated onset of morphological encoding proposed by Indefrey and Levelt (2004) but not with other processing stages such as conceptual preparation or lemma retrieval.…”