Seeing stems everywhere: Position-independent identification of stem morphemes.

Abstract

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like overhang and hangover, and to recognize that preheat is a word, whereas heatpre is not. Recent data have shown that suffixes are identified as morphemes only when they occur at the end of letter strings (Crepaldi, Rastle, & Davis, 2010, "Morphemes in Their Place: Evidence for Position-Specific Identification of Suffixes," Memory & Cognition, 38, 312-321), which supports the general proposal that the word identification system is sensitive to morpheme positional constraints. This proposal leads to the prediction that the identification of free stems should occur in a position-independent fashion, given that free stems can occur anywhere within complex words (e.g., overdress and dresser). In Experiment 1, we show that the rejection time of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin), suggesting that honey and moon are identified within moonhoney, and that these morpheme representations activate the representation for the word honeymoon. In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the masked presentation of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) facilitates the identification of compound words (honeymoon). In contrast, monomorphemic control pairs do not produce a similar pattern (i.e., rickmave did not prime maverick), indicating that the effect for moonhoney pairs is genuinely morphological in nature. These results demonstrate that stem representations differ from affix representations in terms of their positional constraints, providing a challenge to all existing theories of morphological processing.

How Linearity and Structural Complexity Interact and Affect the Recognition of Italian Derived Words

“…Contrary to our predictions, however, and in contrast to prior research (Burani et al 1997;Caramazza et al 1988;Crepaldi et al 2010Crepaldi et al , 2013Monsell 1985;Taft and Forster 1975;Taft et al 1986), pseudo nonwords were generally found to be slower and less accurate than mismatched nonwords. This finding was particularly robust in the accuracy data for both prefix and suffix conditions, but further analysis of the linearity by complexity interaction in the RT data revealed that the main effect was primarily due to suffixed items since the prefixed pseudo and mismatched nonwords were not significantly different.…”

Effects of emotional music on visual processes in inferior temporal area

“…This right-sided dominancy in a part of facial processing observed in the present study is supported by previous studies related to facial recognition dominantly in the right hemisphere (Baumgartner et al, 2006;Dimberg & Petterson, 2000;Gainotti, 2007;Keenan, Nelson, O'Connor, & Pascual-Leone, 2001;Müller, Cieslik, Turetsky, & Eickhoff, 2012;Schiltz et al, 2006), including a study on the modification of cortical activity on exposure to fearful faces (Bayle & Taylor, 2010;Najt, Bayer, & Hausmann, 2012). Apart from the facial process, the present results might reflect the complex and asymmetric brain activity for emotional auditory stimulation (Gadea, Espert, Salvador, & Martí-Bonmatí, 2011).…”

Manipulations of word frequency reveal differences in the processing of morphologically complex and simple words in German

“…Compounds were recognized significantly faster than frequency- and length-matched monomorphemic nouns, and the MEG signal also revealed evidence for early decomposition. Crepaldi et al (2013) reported that the morphemes moon and honey from transposed-constituent pseudocompounds ( * moonhoney ), activate the representation of honeymoon. Lemhöfer et al (2011) showed that orthotactic cues at the morpheme boundaries of Dutch compounds led to faster responses compared to compounds lacking such cues, thus providing evidence for morphemic parsing.…”