Evidence for early morphological decomposition: Combining masked priming with magnetoencephalography
TL;DR: Data regarding the transitional probability from stem to affix in a post hoc comparison is presented, which suggests that this factor may modulate early morphological decomposition, particularly for opaque words.
Abstract: Are words stored as morphologically structured representations? If so, when during word recognition are morphological pieces accessed? Recent masked priming studies support models that assume early decomposition of (potentially) morphologically complex words. The electrophysiological evidence, however, is inconsistent. We combined masked morphological priming with magneto-encephalography (MEG), a technique particularly adept at indexing processes involved in lexical access. The latency of an MEG component peaking, on average, 220 msec post-onset of the target in left occipito-temporal brain regions was found to be sensitive to the morphological prime-target relationship under masked priming conditions in a visual lexical decision task. Shorter latencies for related than unrelated conditions were observed both for semantically transparent (cleaner-CLEAN) and opaque (corner-CORN) prime-target pairs, but not for prime-target pairs with only an orthographic relationship (brothel-BROTH). These effects are likely to reflect a prelexical level of processing where form-based representations of stems and affixes are represented and are in contrast to models positing no morphological structure in lexical representations. Moreover, we present data regarding the transitional probability from stem to affix in a post hoc comparison, which suggests that this factor may modulate early morphological decomposition, particularly for opaque words. The timing of a robust MEG component sensitive to the morphological relatedness of prime-target pairs can be used to further understand the neural substrates and the time course of lexical processing.
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TL;DR: In the verb-initial language Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, verb-dependencies exhibit a special verbal inflection known as wh-agreement as mentioned in this paper : verbs along the path of the wh-dependency are inflected for the grammatical relation of the gap and the intermediate landing sites of the filler.
Abstract: In the verb-initial language Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, wh -dependencies exhibit a special verbal inflection known as wh-agreement : verbs along the path of the wh -dependency are inflected for the grammatical relation of the gap and the intermediate landing sites of the filler. Two on-line comprehension experiments conducted in the Northern Mariana Islands reveal that the morphological paradigm of wh -agreement affects the timing of dependency formation and interpretation in this language. Overt wh -agreement facilitates the formation of a wh -dependency. When overt wh -agreement could occur but does not, however, its absence delays and attenuates wh -dependency formation. In short, morphological information exerts a powerful influence on the unfolding parse, one that has temporal priority over syntactic information, such as word order, and semantic information, such as argument structure.
9 citations
TL;DR: Results indicate that words with morpho‐syntactic wellformedness as stem‐suffix combinations are decomposed by the system, thus supporting the former hypothesis and suggesting that knowledge of morpho-syntact rules can be used to form morphological representations of written words, in absence of independent experience with all of their constituent morphemes.
9 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigated the temporal dynamics of processing Finnish monomorphemic nouns with rich stem allomorphy versus nouns having no variation in stem by conducting an event-related potential (ERP).
Abstract: Are words with form variations in the stem (e.g. foot ~ feet) perceptually processed in the same way as those without (e.g. table)? The majority of psycholinguistic literature concerning (ir)regular morphology concentrates on the processing or storage of inflected forms (e.g., feet vs. tables or thought vs. walked) in relation to their base forms. This article discusses the recognition of base forms of words in relation to their paradigmatic complexity (stem allomorphy). Do words like foot have some benefits in their recognition because of stem allomorphy, or do they rather cause an inhibition effect because of competition in form variation? Or could it be that there is no activation of the allomorph feet when we process the word foot, and thus no influence on the base form? With these and related questions in mind, we investigated the temporal dynamics of processing Finnish monomorphemic nouns with rich stem allomorphy versus nouns with no variation in stem by conducting an event-related potential (ERP) ...
8 citations
TL;DR: Results indicate that a top-down influence from the left IFG to the MCC, and then to the precuneus, is critical in syntactic decisions, whereas the Mcc shares its task-set information with the leftIFG to achieve automatic and predictive processes of syntax.
Abstract: Predictive syntactic processing plays an essential role in language comprehension. In our previous study using Japanese object-verb (OV) sentences, we showed that the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) responses to a verb increased at 120-140 ms after the verb onset, indicating predictive effects caused by a preceding object. To further elucidate the automaticity of the predictive effects in the present magnetoencephalography study, we examined whether a subliminally presented verb (“subliminal verb”) enhanced the predictive effects on the sentence-final verb (“target verb”) unconsciously, i.e., without awareness. By presenting a subliminal verb after the object, enhanced predictive effects on the target verb would be detected in the OV sentences when the transitivity of the target verb matched with that of the subliminal verb (“congruent condition”), because the subliminal verb just after the object could determine the grammaticality of the sentence. For the OV sentences under the congruent condition, we observed significantly increased left IFG responses at 140-160 ms after the target verb onset. In contrast, responses in the precuneus and midcingulate cortex (MCC) were significantly reduced for the OV sentences under the congruent condition at 110-140 and 280-300 ms, respectively. By using partial Granger causality analyses for the OV sentences under the congruent condition, we revealed a bidirectional interaction between the left IFG and MCC at 60-160 ms, as well as a significant influence from the MCC to the precuneus. These results indicate that a top-down influence from the left IFG to the MCC, and then to the precuneus, is critical in syntactic decisions, whereas the MCC shares its task-set information with the left IFG to achieve automatic and predictive processes of syntax.
8 citations
Cites background from "Evidence for early morphological de..."
...…occurs in the absence of awareness (Batterink and Neville, 2013; Axelrod et al., 2014), while some subliminal priming studies have targeted lower levels of phonology, morphology, and lexico-semantics (Kouider and Dehaene, 2007; Nakamura et al., 2007; Lehtonen et al., 2011; Wilson et al., 2011)....
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TL;DR: This study finds that MEG responses to prefixed words reveal interesting early differences in the lateralization of the form-based decomposition response compared to the effects reported in the literature for suffixed words, but a very similar post-decomposition profile.
Abstract: We revisit a long-standing question in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature on comprehending morphologically complex words: are prefixes and suffixes processed using the same cognitive mechanisms? Recent work using MEG to uncover the dynamic temporal and spatial responses evoked by visually presented complex suffixed single words provide us with a comprehensive picture of morphological processing in the brain, from early, form-based decomposition, through lexical access, grammatically constrained recomposition, and semantic interpretation. In the present study, we find that MEG responses to prefixed words reveal interesting early differences in the lateralization of the form-based decomposition response compared to the effects reported in the literature for suffixed words, but a very similar post-decomposition profile. These results not only address a question stretching back to the earliest days of modern psycholinguistics, but also add critical support and nuance to our much newer emerging understanding of spatial organization and temporal dynamics of morphological processing in the human brain.
7 citations
References
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TL;DR: A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena.
Abstract: How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.
6,014 citations
"Evidence for early morphological de..." refers background in this paper
...According to semantic relatedness values (Latent Semantic Analysis; Landauer & Dumais, 1997), the prime–target pairs in the transparent condition were significantly more related semantically than in the opaque and orthographic conditions, which, in turn, did not differ from each other in terms of the semantic relatedness (see Rastle et al., 2004, for a statistical summary of the stimulus characteristics)....
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...According to semantic relatedness values (Latent Semantic Analysis; Landauer & Dumais, 1997), the prime–target pairs in the transparent condition were significantly more related semantically than in the opaque and orthographic conditions, which, in turn, did not differ from each other in terms of…...
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TL;DR: DMDX is a Windows-based program designed primarily for language-processing experiments that uses the features of Pentium class CPUs and the library routines provided in DirectX to provide accurate timing and synchronization of visual and audio output.
Abstract: DMDX is a Windows-based program designed primarily for language-processing experiments. It uses the features of Pentium class CPUs and the library routines provided in DirectX to provide accurate timing and synchronization of visual and audio output. A brief overview of the design of the program is provided, together with the results of tests of the accuracy of timing. The Web site for downloading the software is given, but the source code is not available.
2,541 citations
"Evidence for early morphological de..." refers methods in this paper
...The stimuli were presented using DMDX (Forster & Forster, 2003)....
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TL;DR: It is concluded that connectionists' claims about the dispensability of rules in explanations in the psychology of language must be rejected, and that, on the contrary, the linguistic and developmental facts provide good evidence for such rules.
1,439 citations
TL;DR: The authors showed that the frequency attenuation effect is a product of the involvement of the episodic memory system in the lexical decision process, which is supported by the demonstration of constant repetition effects for high and low-frequency words when the priming stimulus is masked; the masking is assumed to minimize the influence of any possible episodic trace of the prime.
Abstract: Repetition priming effects in lexical decision tasks are stronger for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. This frequency attenuation effect creates problems for frequency-ordered search models that assume a relatively stable frequency effect. The suggestion is made that frequency attenuation is a product of the involvement of the episodic memory system in the lexical decision process. This hypothesis is supported by the demonstration of constant repetition effects for high- and low-frequency words when the priming stimulus is masked; the masking is assumed to minimize the influence of any possible episodic trace of the prime. It is further shown that long-term repetition effects are much less reliable when the subject is not required to make a lexical decision response to the prime. When a response is required, the expected frequency attenuation effect is restored. It is concluded that normal repetition effects consist of two components: a very brief lexical effect that is independent of frequency and a long-term episodic effect that is sensitive to frequency. There has been much recent interest in the fact that in a lexical decision experiment, where subjects are required to classify letter strings as words or nonwords, there is a substantial increase in both the speed and the accuracy of classificatio n for words that are presented more than once during the experiment, even though considerable time may have elapsed between successive presen
1,324 citations
"Evidence for early morphological de..." refers background in this paper
...Masked priming has proven to be a powerful psycholinguistic tool in assessing lexical processes and representation (Forster, 1998; Forster & Davis, 1984)....
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Book•
03 Jan 1986
TL;DR: The authors presented an alternative to the standard rule-based account of a child's acquisition of the past tense in English by dispensing with the assumption that the child learns rules and substituting in its place a simple homogeneous learning procedure.
Abstract: : This paper presents an alternative to the standard rule based account of a child's acquisition of the past tense in English. Children are typically said to pass through a three-phase acquisition process in which they first learn past tense by rote, then learn the past tense rule and over regularize, and then finally learn the exceptions to the rule. We show that the acquisition data can be accounted for in more detail by dispensing with the assumption that the child learns rules and substituting in its place a simple homogeneous learning procedure. We show how rule-like behavior can emerge from the interactions among a network of units encoding the root form to past tense mapping. A large computer simulation of the learning process demonstrates the operating principles of our alternative account, shows how details of the acquisition process not captured by the rule account emerge, and makes predictions about other details of the acquisition process not yet observed. Keywords: Learning; networks; Language; Verbs; Perceptions; Morphology.
1,210 citations