Abstract
Psycholinguistic and electrophysiological studies of lexical processing show convergent evidence for morpheme-based lexical access for morphologically complex words that involves early decomposition into their constituent morphemes followed by some combinatorial operation. Considering that both semantically transparent (e.g., sailboat) and semantically opaque (e.g., bootleg) compounds undergo morphological decomposition during the earlier stages of lexical processing, subsequent combinatorial operations should account for the difference in the contribution of the constituent morphemes to the meaning of these different word types. In this study we use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to pinpoint the neural bases of this combinatorial stage in English compound word recognition. MEG data were acquired while participants performed a word naming task in which three word types, transparent compounds (e.g., roadside), opaque compounds (e.g., butterfly), and morphologically simple words (e.g., brothel) were contrasted in a partial-repetition priming paradigm where the word of interest was primed by one of its constituent morphemes. Analysis of onset latency revealed shorter latencies to name compound words than simplex words when primed, further supporting a stage of morphological decomposition in lexical access. An analysis of the associated MEG activity uncovered a region of interest implicated in morphological composition, the Left Anterior Temporal Lobe (LATL). Only transparent compounds showed increased activity in this area from 250 to 470 ms. Previous studies using sentences and phrases have highlighted the role of LATL in performing computations for basic combinatorial operations. Results are in tune with decomposition models for morpheme accessibility early in processing and suggest that semantics play a role in combining the meanings of morphemes when their composition is transparent to the overall word meaning.
Highlights
Some words are simple and some words are not
This effect shows that there is a greater facilitation in word naming for compound words than for morphologically simple words when primed
Analyses of the different word types in isolation revealed very consistent evidence that there is a difference in how simplex and complex words are processed in the brain
Summary
Some words are simple and some words are not. This, at first, sounds like a very trivial tautology, but the controversy over whether multi-morphemic words are stored in whole word form (Butterworth, 1983; Giraudo and Grainger, 2001) or always constructed from their morphemicIntegrating morpheme form and meaning parts (Taft, 2004) has been entertaining, provocative, and contentious in the field of lexical processing for the last 40 years. Results from electrophysiology (Fiorentino et al, 2014) revealed a greater negativity for lexicalized compounds (e.g., teacup) and novel compounds (e.g., tombnote) compared to mono-morphemic words in a time window of 275–400 ms, positing a stage where morpheme meanings are combined in English compounds These psychological models make clear predictions as to the stages and time-course of lexical access, but currently, there is a lack of evidence for the anchoring of these stages to particular areas of the brain. Research from the picture naming literature (Dohmes et al, 2004) suggests that there should be greater activation at this stage in processing for semantically transparent complex words since they exhibit greater conceptual activation, and lemma competition in addition to the effect of morphological overlap This area should be sensitive only to the composition within complex words whose morpheme meaning have a semantically transparent relationship to the overall meaning as compared to complex words whose morphemes do not share a semantic relationship, opaque
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