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Journal ArticleDOI

Evidence for early morphological decomposition: Combining masked priming with magnetoencephalography

01 Nov 2011-Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (NIH Public Access)-Vol. 23, Iss: 11, pp 3366-3379
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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Citations
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01 Jan 1985
TL;DR: This paper discusses one aspect of the lexicon, namely its morphological organization, and describes this kind of lexicon system as most suited for describing suffixing languages with a comparatively high degree of agglutination.
Abstract: 1. In trod u otion In this paper, I w ill discuss one aspect of the lexicon, namely its morphological organization. For about two years I have been working with Koakenniemi's twolevel model (Koakenniemi 1983)i on a Polish two-level description. In this work, I have become more and more Interested in the formalism it s e l f , something that has tended to push work on the language description into the background. It seems to be the case that in moat concrete two-level descriptions, the rule component is forced to carry too heavy a burden in comparison with the lexicon, perhaps because the lexicon is very simple as to its implementation. Like many other lexical systems in computer applications i t is implemented as a tree, with a root node and leaves, from which the lexical entries eire retrieved when the analysts routine has traversed the tree. The twolevel lexicon la a bit more sophisticated than th is , however, in that there la not only one, but several lexicon trees, the so called minilexicons. The user links the mlnilexicona into a whole, moat often into a root lexicon and a number of su ffix lexicons. In Hockett'a terminology, we could apeak of an Itern-and-Arrangement (lA) model (Hockett 1958, pp 386ff). Elsewhere I have characterized this kind of lexicon system as most suited for describing suffixing languages with a comparatively high degree of agglutination (Borin 1985f p 35); This is mainly due to the fact that the system works according to what Blåberg (1984, p 6 l) aptly has termed the "forget-where-you-came-from"

261 citations

Book ChapterDOI
13 May 2013

183 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The data support a model of word recognition in which decomposition is attempted, and possibly utilized, for complex words containing bound roots as well as free word-stems, and find evidence of decomposition for both free stems and bound roots at the M170 stage in processing.
Abstract: We employ a single-trial correlational MEG analysis technique to investigate early processing in the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Three classes of affixed words were presented in a lexical decision task: free stems (e.g., taxable), bound roots (e.g., tolerable), and unique root words (e.g., vulnerable, the root of which does not appear elsewhere). Analysis was focused on brain responses within 100-200 msec poststimulus onset in the previously identified letter string and visual word-form areas. MEG data were analyzed using cortically constrained minimum-norm estimation. Correlations were computed between activity at functionally defined ROIs and continuous measures of the words' morphological properties. ROIs were identified across subjects on a reference brain and then morphed back onto each individual subject's brain (n = 9). We find evidence of decomposition for both free stems and bound roots at the M170 stage in processing. The M170 response is shown to be sensitive to morphological properties such as affix frequency and the conditional probability of encountering each word given its stem. These morphological properties are contrasted with orthographic form features (letter string frequency, transition probability from one string to the next), which exert effects on earlier stages in processing (∼130 msec). We find that effects of decomposition at the M170 can, in fact, be attributed to morphological properties of complex words, rather than to purely orthographic and form-related properties. Our data support a model of word recognition in which decomposition is attempted, and possibly utilized, for complex words containing bound roots as well as free word-stems.

129 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jul 2019-Cortex
TL;DR: The view that learning to appreciate morphological relationships may be a vital part of acquiring a direct mapping between printed words and their meanings, represented in the ventral brain pathway of the reading network is developed.

91 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work uses MEG to provide evidence for the temporally-differentiated stages of the Full Decomposition model, and demonstrates an early effect of derivational family entropy, corresponding to the stem lookup stage, and a late effect of a novel statistical measure, semantic coherence, which quantifies the gradient semantic well-formedness of complex words.

68 citations


Cites background from "Evidence for early morphological de..."

  • ...Taking advantage of the temporal resolution of MEG, here we separately examine both the hypothesized earlier derivational family entropy effect on lexical access for a stem, as well as the hypothesized later surface frequency effect on recombination of stem and affix....

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  • ...Using MEG, Lehtonen, Monahan, and Poeppel (2011) found similar effects for regular derived words at a latency of !...

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The results suggest that the inflectional processing cost stems from the later, lexical-semantic stage of processing in both modalities, and that combinatorial case-inflection processing requires a real word stem in order to proceed.

37 citations


"Evidence for early morphological de..." refers background in this paper

  • ...…directly be attributed to early visual prelexical decomposition, neither behaviorally (Hyönä, Vainio, & Laine, 2002), nor in brain imaging (Lehtonen, Vorobyev, Hugdahl, Tuokkola, & Laine, 2006) or electrophysiological measures (Leinonen et al., 2009; Vartiainen et al., 2009; Lehtonen et al., 2007)....

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  • ...This is despite the fact that effects of morphological decomposition that are likely to correspond to a later lexical or semantic access stage (Leinonen et al., 2009; Vartiainen et al., 2009; Fiorentino & Poeppel, 2007; Lehtonen et al., 2006, 2007) and/or to the semantic-syntactic integration of morphemes (Leinonen et al....

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  • ..., 2006, 2007) and/or to the semantic-syntactic integration of morphemes (Leinonen et al., 2009; Vartiainen et al., 2009; Lehtonen et al., 2006, 2007) have been observed in these contrasts....

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  • ...This is despite the fact that effects of morphological decomposition that are likely to correspond to a later lexical or semantic access stage (Leinonen et al., 2009; Vartiainen et al., 2009; Fiorentino & Poeppel, 2007; Lehtonen et al., 2006, 2007) and/or to the semantic-syntactic integration of…...

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  • ...Apart from Zweig and Pylkkänen (2009), direct contrasts between visually presented morphologically complex and simple words in the standard visual lexical decision (without priming or other manipulations) have not usually found robust effects that could directly be attributed to early visual prelexical decomposition, neither behaviorally (Hyönä, Vainio, & Laine, 2002), nor in brain imaging (Lehtonen, Vorobyev, Hugdahl, Tuokkola, & Laine, 2006) or electrophysiological measures (Leinonen et al., 2009; Vartiainen et al., 2009; Lehtonen et al., 2007)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of morphological complexity on word identification was studied in three experiments conducted in Finnish, employing the same set of target nouns, and the results showed more effortful processing for inflected than monomorphemic nouns.
Abstract: The effect of morphological complexity on word identification was studied in three experiments conducted in Finnish, employing the same set of target nouns. In Experiment 1, the target nouns were presented in isolation, and lexical decision times were employed as lexical access measures. In Experiments 2 and 3, the same words were embedded in sentence contexts, where both the inflected and non-inflected forms were equally plausible, and eye fixation patterns (Exp. 2) and lexical decision latencies (Exp. 3) were recorded. The experiment with isolated words replicated previous lexical decision studies by showing more effortful processing for inflected than monomorphemic nouns. However, this morphological complexity effect did not generalise to the context experiments; fixation durations and response latencies were highly similar for inflected and monomorphemic words. It is suggested that, at least for the type of inflected nouns studied, the morphological effect observed for isolated words may derive from t...

36 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate semantic, morphological and formal (orthographic) processing conjointly in a masked priming paradigm to reduce strategic effects related to prime perception and suppress semantic priming effects.

27 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The present study used event-related potentials to examine the time-course of relative-position and absolute-position orthographic priming and provides important information about the time of activation of location-specific and location-invariant (word-centered) orthographic representations during visual word recognition.

27 citations


"Evidence for early morphological de..." refers background or result in this paper

  • ...The gradual pattern at the N250, a component that has earlier been associated with prelexical processing (Grainger & Holcomb, 2009; Holcomb & Grainger, 2006), was interpreted to reflect interactions between prelexical and semantic processing....

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  • ...The N250 is a component frequently elicited by masked priming in EEG, and it appears to be sensitive to sublexical properties (e.g., orthographic and phonological overlap between the prime and the target; see Grainger & Holcomb, 2009)....

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  • ...Another possibility is that it is in some way specific to masked priming (consistent with the hypothesis that the N250 elicited in the EEG masked priming experiments is specific to the masked priming design; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explored morphological decomposition processes with bilinguals, focusing on within and cross-language masked morphological priming effects, and found that the cognate status of masked Spanish primes was manipulated to explore the extent to which form overlap mediates cross-lingual morphology priming.
Abstract: This article explores how bilinguals perform automatic morphological decomposition processes, focusing on within- and cross-language masked morphological priming effects. In Experiment 1, unbalanced Spanish (L1)–English (L2) bilingual participants completed a lexical decision task on English targets that could be preceded by morphologically related or unrelated derived masked English and Spanish prime words. The cognate status of the masked Spanish primes was manipulated, in order to explore to what extent form overlap mediates cross-language morphological priming. In Experiment 2, a group of balanced native Basque–Spanish speakers completed a lexical decision task on Spanish targets preceded by morphologically related or unrelated Basque or Spanish masked primes. In this experiment, a large number of items were tested and the cognate status was manipulated according to a continuous measure of orthographic overlap, allowing for a fine-grained analysis of the role of form overlap in cross-language morpholo...

26 citations