title: Electrophysiological evidence for the morpheme-based combinatoric processing of English compounds.
abstract: The extent to which the processing of compounds (e.g., "catfish") makes recourse to morphological-level representations remains a matter of debate. Moreover, positing a morpheme-level route to complex word recognition entails not only access to morphological constituents, but also combinatoric processes operating on the constituent representations; however, the neurophysiological mechanisms subserving decomposition, and in particular morpheme combination, have yet to be fully elucidated. The current study presents electrophysiological evidence for the morpheme-based processing of both lexicalized (e.g., "teacup") and novel (e.g., "tombnote") visually presented English compounds; these brain responses appear prior to and are dissociable from the eventual overt lexical decision response. The electrophysiological results reveal increased negativities for conditions with compound structure, including effects shared by lexicalized and novel compounds, as well as effects unique to each compound type, which may be related to aspects of morpheme combination. These findings support models positing across-the-board morphological decomposition, counter to models proposing that putatively complex words are primarily or solely processed as undecomposed representations, and motivate further electrophysiological research toward a more precise characterization of the nature and neurophysiological instantiation of complex word recognition.
authors.affiliation: a Neurolinguistics & Language Processing Laboratory, Department of Linguistics , University of Kansas , Lawrence , KS , USA.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fiorentino
authors.forename: Yuka
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Naito-Billen
authors.forename: Jamie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bost
authors.forename: Ella
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fund-Reznicek
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Compound words; Electroencephalography.; Lexical access; Lexical decision; Morphology