Evidence for Early Morphological Decomposition in Visual Word Recognition

Olla Solomyak · Alec Marantz

147 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Reading and Literacy Development Visual perception and processing mechanisms Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Abstract

We employ a single-trial correlational MEG analysis technique to investigate early processing in the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Three classes of affixed words were presented in a lexical decision task: free stems (e.g., taxable), bound roots (e.g., tolerable), and unique root words (e.g., vulnerable, the root of which does not appear elsewhere). Analysis was focused on brain responses within 100-200 msec poststimulus onset in the previously identified letter string and visual word-form areas. MEG data were analyzed using cortically constrained minimum-norm estimation. Correlations were computed between activity at functionally defined ROIs and continuous measures of the words' morphological properties. ROIs were identified across subjects on a reference brain and then morphed back onto each individual subject's brain (n = 9). We find evidence of decomposition for both free stems and bound roots at the M170 stage in processing. The M170 response is shown to be sensitive to morphological properties such as affix frequency and the conditional probability of encountering each word given its stem. These morphological properties are contrasted with orthographic form features (letter string frequency, transition probability from one string to the next), which exert effects on earlier stages in processing ( approximately 130 msec). We find that effects of decomposition at the M170 can, in fact, be attributed to morphological properties of complex words, rather than to purely orthographic and form-related properties. Our data support a model of word recognition in which decomposition is attempted, and possibly utilized, for complex words containing bound roots as well as free word-stems.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 147 citations exist upstream.

References

2007The English Lexicon Project 2003The visual word form area: expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus 2000Words and rules: the ingredients of language 1975Lexical storage and retrieval of prefixed words 2008Architecture and Blocking 2002The visual word form area: a prelexical representation of visual words in the fusiform gyrus 2004The broth in my brother’s brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition 2006The time course of visual word recognition as revealed by linear regression analysis of ERP data

Cited by

2015Decomposition, lookup, and recombination: MEG evidence for the Full Decomposition model of complex visual word recognition 2012Early, equivalent ERP masked priming effects for regular and irregular morphology 2011The neural basis of obligatory decomposition of suffixed words 2012A universal approach to modeling visual word recognition and reading: Not only possible, but also inevitable 2012Tracking hierarchical processing in morphological decomposition with brain potentials.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.