Neural Correlates of Morphological Decomposition during Visual Word Recognition

Brian T. Gold · Kathleen Rastle

112 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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

Abstract

Considerable behavioral research has demonstrated that the visual word recognition system is sensitive to morphological structure. It has typically been assumed that analysis of morphologically complex words occurs only when the meaning of these words can be derived from the meanings of their constituents (e.g., hunter = hunt + er). However, results from recent behavioral research using the masked priming technique have demonstrated that morphological analysis can occur at an earlier orthographic level, in cases in which the meanings of complex words cannot be derived from their constituents (e.g., corner = corn + er). Here, we combine the logic of behavioral masked priming with the neurophysiological phenomenon of functional magnetic resonance imaging priming suppression to look for evidence of nonsemantic morphological priming at the neural level. Both behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging results indicated priming effects associated with the mere appearance of morphological structure (corner-CORN). In addition, these effects were distinguishable from lexical-semantic effects (bucket-PAIL) and orthographic effects (brothel-BROTH). Three left-lateralized occipito-temporal regions showed sensitivity to early morphological components of visual word recognition. Two of these regions also showed orthographic priming ( approximately BA 37, peak: -48 -60 -17; approximately BA 19, peak: -40 -77 -1), whereas one was sensitive only to morphological similarity between primes and targets ( approximately BA 19, peak: -37 -67 -7). These findings provide a neurobiological basis for a purely structural morphemic segmentation mechanism operating at early stages of visual word recognition.

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References

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2011The neural basis of obligatory decomposition of suffixed words 2008Doesdarknesslead tohappiness? Masked suffix priming effects 2010Form and meaning in early morphological processing: Comment on Feldman, O’Connor, and Moscoso del Prado Martín (2009)2012Early morphological processing is sensitive to morphemic meanings: Evidence from processing ambiguous morphemes 2010Is morpho-orthographic decomposition purely orthographic? Evidence from masked priming in the same–different task

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