Morphological decomposition involving non-productive morphemes: ERP evidence.
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.
McKinnon
Richard
R
Department of Linguistics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Allen
Mark
M
Osterhout
Lee
L
D000328:Adult; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading