Abstract
Complex words can be seen as combinations of elementary units, decomposable into stems and affixes according to morphological rules. Alternatively, complex forms may be stored as single lexical entries and accessed as whole forms. This study uses an event-related potential brain response capable of indexing both whole-form retrieval and combinatorial processing, the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), to investigate early brain activity elicited by morphologically complex derived words in German. We presented complex words consisting of stems “sicher” (secure), or “sauber” (clean) combined with abstract nominalizing derivational affixes -heit or -keit, to form either congruent derived words: “Sicherheit” (security) and “Sauberkeit” (cleanliness), or incongruent derived pseudowords: *“Sicherkeit”, and *“Sauberheit”. Using this orthogonal design, it was possible to record brain responses for -heit and -keit in both congruent and incongruent contexts, therefore balancing acoustic variance. Previous research has shown that incongruent combinations of symbols elicit a stronger MMN than congruent combinations, but that single words or constructions stored as whole forms elicit a stronger MMN than pseudowords or non-existent constructions. We found that congruent derived words elicited a stronger MMN than incongruent derived words, beginning about 150 ms after perception of the critical morpheme. This pattern of results is consistent with whole-form storage of morphologically complex derived words as lexical units, or mini-constructions. Using distributed source localization methods, the MMN enhancement for well-formed derivationally complex words appeared to be most prominent in the left inferior anterior-temporal, bilateral superior parietal and bilateral post-central, supra-marginal areas. In addition, neurophysiological results reflected the frequency of derived forms, thus providing further converging evidence for whole form storage and against a combinatorial mechanism.
Highlights
The defining characteristic of human language is the ability to iteratively combine units of meaning into more and more complex meaningful structures
Previous research has shown that incongruent combinations of symbols elicit a stronger Mismatch Negativity (MMN) than congruent combinations, but that single words or constructions stored as whole forms elicit a stronger MMN than pseudowords or non-existent constructions
SENSORS Standard analysis Mismatch negativies and deviant topographies for the four conditions are displayed in Figure 3 relative to a trigger point at the onset of the derivational suffixes “heit” or “keit”, where the acoustic waveforms of the standard and deviant stimuli first differed
Summary
The defining characteristic of human language is the ability to iteratively combine units of meaning into more and more complex meaningful structures. Compelling arguments have been raised that at least a subset of the frequently used complex forms are stored as whole forms or mini-constructions in a lexicon or “constructicon” (Langacker, 1987; Goldberg, 2003). These stored forms would be activated as whole units in the word recognition and language comprehension process. Such whole-form constructions may exist at the level of sentences (idioms, for example), phrases, or single, morphologically complex words
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