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Decomposition, Inflected nouns, Language, MEG
Abstract:
Despite considerable research interest, it is still an open issue as to how morphologically complex words such
as “car+s” are represented and processed in the brain. We studied the neural correlates of the processing of
inflected nouns in the morphologically rich Finnish language. Previous behavioral studies in Finnish have
yielded a robust inflectional processing cost, i.e., inflected words are harder to recognize than otherwise
matched morphologically simple words. Theoretically this effect could stem either from decomposition of
inflected words into a stem and a suffix at input level and/or from subsequent recombination at the
semantic–syntactic level to arrive at an interpretation of the word. To shed light on this issue, we used
magnetoencephalography to reveal the time course and localization of neural effects of morphological
structure and frequency of written words. Ten subjects silently read high- and low-frequency Finnish words
in inflected and monomorphemic form. Morphological complexity was accompanied by stronger and longerlasting
activation of the left superior temporal cortex from 200 ms onwards. Earlier effects of morphology
were not found, supporting the view that the well-established behavioral processing cost for inflected words
stems from the semantic–syntactic level rather than from early decomposition. Since the effect of
morphology was detected throughout the range of word frequencies employed, the majority of inflected
Finnish words appears to be represented in decomposed form and only very high-frequency inflected words
may acquire full-form representations.
