Fiorentino, R.
Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas
In this special session, we will bring together current research on morphology from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, exploring the application of imaging methodologies including fMRI, EEG, and MEG to the investigation of the nature and real-time processing of morphologically complex words. The presentations in this session engage issues in morphological processing in the domains of derivation, inflection and compounding, across comprehension and production, and across auditory and visual modalities. In my introductory presentation to this special session, I will outline some of the major themes emerging in this approach to the study of morphology in the mind/brain, and will briefly present some recent work from my laboratory, focusing on the segmentation, decomposition and composition of compound words using a cross-method, cognitive neuroscience approach. In particular, I will discuss a set of studies on the processing of visually presented novel compounds, utilizing electrophysiological methods (EEG/MEG) in tandem with priming, lexical decision, and passive reading paradigms. The results, both psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic, demonstrate the potential for tracking the segmentation, morphological activation, and post-decompositional combinatorics involved in complex word processing in real time, making possible the testing of alternative hypotheses regarding the precise nature of the morpheme-level route to lexical processing and its neural instantiation.