Abstract
Neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation supports the early decomposition of morphologically complex words within the ventral processing stream, which MEG has localized to the M170 response in the (left) visual word form area (VWFA). Decomposition into an exhaustive parse of visual morpheme forms extends beyond words like farmer to those imitating complexity (e.g., brother; Lewis et al., 2011), and to "unique" stems occurring in only one word but following the syntax and semantics of their affix (e.g., vulnerable; Gwilliams & Marantz, 2018). Evidence comes primarily from suffixation; other morphological processes have been under-investigated. This study explores circumfixation, infixation, and reduplication in Tagalog. In addition to investigating whether these are parsed like suffixation, we address an outstanding question concerning semantically empty morphemes. Some words in Tagalog resemble English winter as decomposition is not supported (wint-er); these apparently reduplicated pseudoreduplicates lack the syntactic and semantic features of reduplicated forms. However, unlike winter, these words exhibit phonological behavior predicted only if they involve a reduplicating morpheme. If these are decomposed, this provides evidence that words are analyzed as complex, like English vulnerable, when the grammar demands it. In a lexical decision task with MEG, we find that VWFA activity correlates with stem:word transition probability for circumfixed, infixed, and reduplicated words. Furthermore, a Bayesian analysis suggests that pseudoreduplicates with reduplicate-like phonology are also decomposed; other pseudoreduplicates are not. These findings are consistent with an interpretation that decomposition is modulated by phonology in addition to syntax and semantics.
Highlights
The process of word recognition is necessarily complicated for words composed of multiple morphemic constituents
The present study aims to explore the implications of Tagalog morphology, including reduplication, infixation, and circumfixation, for the early evoked activity in occipito-temporal cortex associated automatic decomposition in visual word recognition models
As outlined in detail in the introduction, the focus of the present study was: Are reduplication, circumfixation, and infixation subject to automatic decomposition by the visual system? are words which superficially appear to be reduplicated or infixed but lack the morphosyntactic and semantic features of these words treated as complex words by the visual system? is the tendency for a word to be treated by the visual system like a reduplicated word modulated by its conformity to phonological rules?
Summary
The process of word recognition is necessarily complicated for words composed of multiple morphemic constituents. The current study aims to contribute unstudied morphological phenomena to the growing body of literature focused on early form-based morphemic decomposition. 2000) posit an early automatic form-based decomposition of complex words into the orthographic forms of their constituent morphemes during visual lexical access “teacher” primes “TEACH” but “brother” primes “BROTH”, despite the fact that the orthographic –er is not an affix in that word (Rastle, Davis, and New 2004; Rastle & Davis 2008). This contrasts with the lack of priming between “brothel”. Neural evidence from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI; Gold & Rastle 2007), magnetoencephalography (MEG; Lehtonen, Monahan, and Poeppel 2011; Lewis, Solomyak, and Marantz 2011; Fruchter and Marantz 2015; Cavalli, Colé, Badier and Ziegler 2016) and electroencephalography
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