Evidence for Early Morphological Decomposition: Combining Masked Priming with Magnetoencephalography

摘要

Are words stored as morphologically structured representations?nIf so, when during word recognition are morphologicalnpieces accessed? Recent masked priming studies support modelsnthat assume early decomposition of (potentially) morphologicallyncomplex words. The electrophysiological evidence,nhowever, is inconsistent. We combined masked morphologicalnpriming with magneto-encephalography (MEG), a techniquenparticularly adept at indexing processes involved in lexical access.nThe latency of an MEG component peaking, on average,n220 msec post-onset of the target in left occipito-temporal brainnregions was found to be sensitive to the morphological prime–ntarget relationship under masked priming conditions in a visualnlexical decision task. Shorter latencies for related than unrelatednconditions were observed both for semantically transparentn(cleaner–CLEAN) and opaque (corner–CORN) prime–targetnpairs, but not for prime–target pairs with only an orthographicnrelationship (brothel–BROTH). These effects are likely to reflectna prelexical level of processing where form-based representationsnof stems and affixes are represented and are inncontrast to models positing no morphological structure in lexicalnrepresentations. Moreover, we present data regarding thentransitional probability from stem to affix in a post hoc comparison,nwhich suggests that this factor may modulate early morphologicalndecomposition, particularly for opaque words. Thentiming of a robust MEG component sensitive to the morphologicalnrelatedness of prime–target pairs can be used to furthernunderstand the neural substrates and the time course of lexicalnprocessing. ■