Morphological decomposition involving non-productive morphemes: ERP evidence.
Neuroreport
; 14(6): 883-6, 2003 May 06.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-12858053
ABSTRACT
It is generally believed that readers decompose a complex word into its constituent morphemes only when those morphemes participate productively in word formation. Here we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to words (e.g. muffler, receive), non-words containing no morphemes (e.g. flermuf), and non-words containing a prefix and a non-productive bound stem (e.g. in-ceive). Prior work has shown that pronounceable non-words elicit larger-amplitude N400 components than words. If readers treat non-words containing non-productive morphemes as unanalyzed wholes, then these non-words should elicit larger N400 s than matched words. We report here, however, that bound-stem non-words elicit a brain response highly similar to that elicited by real words. This finding suggests that morphological decomposition and representation extend to non-productive morphemes.
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Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Reading
/
Evoked Potentials
/
Linguistics
Limits:
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Language:
En
Journal:
Neuroreport
Journal subject:
NEUROLOGIA
Year:
2003
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
United States