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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Dissertation•
01 Jul 2017
TL;DR: The Role of Morphology in Word Recognition of Hebrew as a Templatic Language as mentioned in this paper is an example of the role of morphology in word recognition in the recognition of Hebrew.
Abstract: The Role of Morphology in Word Recognition of Hebrew as a Templatic Language
7 citations
TL;DR: The results support the view that morphological information contributes to lexical access along the ventral pathways, across orthographies and morphological systems.
6 citations
TL;DR: Findings support the claim that listeners decompose morphologically complex words into their constituent units during processing and suggest that people hold representations of base morphemes in the lexicon.
Abstract: Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments The critical manipulations were morphological complexity and the presence of a verbal derivation or nominalizing suffix form Results showed that nominalizations, such as "explosion," were harder to classify as a noun but easier to classify as a word when compared with monomorphemic words with similar actionlike semantics, such as "avalanche" These findings support the claim that listeners decompose morphologically complex words into their constituent units during processing More specifically, the results suggest that people hold representations of base morphemes in the lexicon
6 citations
Cites result from "Evidence for early morphological de..."
...Lehtonen et al. (2011) conducted a similar study using the same materials and found consistent behavioral and magnetoencephalography results in a masked-priming experiment....
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TL;DR: The authors examined the neural basis of processing context-supported or -unsupported interpretations of ambiguous morphemes during Chinese compound word reading in a masked priming lexical decision task and found that both the contextsupported and unsupported meanings evoke significant priming effects, however, they differ from each other with different brain basis.
4 citations
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: This study addresses morphology from the perspective of the unification framework, that is, by applying the Hold/Release paradigm, morphological unification was simulated via the assembly of internal morphemic units into a whole word by demonstrating the validity of unification at the morphological level.
Abstract: Morphology is the aspect of language concerned with the internal structure of words. In the past decades, a large body of masked priming (behavioral and neuroimaging) data has suggested that the visual word recognition system automatically decomposes any morphologically complex word into a stem and its constituent morphemes. Yet the reliance of morphology on other reading processes (e.g., orthography and semantics), as well as its underlying neuronal mechanisms are yet to be determined. In the current magnetoencephalography study, we addressed morphology from the perspective of the unification framework, that is, by applying the Hold/Release paradigm, morphological unification was simulated via the assembly of internal morphemic units into a whole word. Trials representing real words were divided into words with a transparent (true) or a nontransparent (pseudo) morphological relationship. Morphological unification of truly suffixed words was faster and more accurate and additionally enhanced induced oscillations in the narrow gamma band (60–85 Hz, 260–440 ms) in the left posterior occipitotemporal junction. This neural signature could not be explained by a mere automatic lexical processing (i.e., stem perception), but more likely it related to a semantic access step during the morphological unification process. By demonstrating the validity of unification at the morphological level, this study contributes to the vast empirical evidence on unification across other language processes. Furthermore, we point out that morphological unification relies on the retrieval of lexical semantic associations via induced gamma band oscillations in a cerebral hub region for visual word form processing. Hum Brain Mapp 35:5847–5860, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
4 citations
Cites background or result from "Evidence for early morphological de..."
..., 2007; Martin and Thierry, 2008] while other studies refuted this finding [Lavric et al., 2007; Lehtonen et al., 2011; Morris et al., 2008] (in Morris et al....
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...…magnetoencephalography) during the past decade has reshaped theories of morphological processing [e.g., Lavric et al., 2007, 2012; Lehtonen et al., 2011; Morris et al., 2007, 2008; Martin and Thierry, 2008; Solomyak and Marantz, 2009], it has not resolved the debate but has…...
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...Although ample evidence from time-resolving neuroimaging methods (electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography) during the past decade has reshaped theories of morphological processing [e.g., Lavric et al., 2007, 2012; Lehtonen et al., 2011; Morris et al., 2007, 2008; Martin and Thierry, 2008; Solomyak and Marantz, 2009], it has not resolved the debate but has instead complicated and detailed its outlook....
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...…(e.g., N250) [Lavric et al., 2012; Morris et al., 2007; Martin and Thierry, 2008] while other studies refuted this finding [Lavric et al., 2007; Lehtonen et al., 2011; Morris et al., 2008] (in Morris et al., 2008, note however, the differential semantic contribution during the two phases of…...
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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