Morphology and the internal structure of words - PubMed (original) (raw)

Morphology and the internal structure of words

Joseph T Devlin et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004.

Abstract

Morphology is the aspect of language concerned with the internal structure of words, and languages vary in the extent to which they rely on morphological structure. Consequently, it is not clear whether morphology is a basic element of a linguistic structure or whether it emerges from systematic regularities between the form and meaning of words. Here, we looked for evidence of morphological structure at a neural systems level by using a visual masked priming paradigm and functional MRI. Form and meaning relations were manipulated in a 2 x 2 design to identify reductions in blood oxygenation level-dependent signal related to shared form (e.g., corner-corn), shared meaning (e.g., idea-notion), and shared morphemes (e.g., boldly-bold, which overlapped in both form and meaning). Relative to unrelated pairs (e.g., ozone-hero), morphologically related items reduced blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in the posterior angular gyrus bilaterally, left occipitotemporal cortex, and left middle temporal gyrus. In the posterior angular gyrus, a neural priming effect was observed for all three priming conditions, possibly reflecting reduced attentional demands rather than overlapping linguistic representations per se. In contrast, the reductions seen in the left occipitotemporal cortex and left middle temporal gyrus corresponded, respectively, to main effects of orthographic and semantic overlap. As neural regions sensitive to morphological structure overlapped almost entirely with regions sensitive to orthographic and semantic relatedness, our results suggest that morphology emerges from the convergence of form and meaning.

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Figures

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

The visual masked priming paradigm and behavioral results. (a) The sequence of events in a single trial. (b) Experimental conditions that varied the relation between the prime and target. Pairs that shared visual form (+orth) had overlapping orthography whereas pairs with related meanings (+sem) had considerable semantic overlap. The mean (±SEM) reaction times in the subject analysis (c) and accuracy per condition (d) with the word conditions shown in gray and the nonword conditions in black.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.

Regional BOLD signal reductions. (Left) Reductions in activation (thresholded at Z >2.3) corresponding to morphological (red), orthographic (blue), or semantic (yellow) relatedness. (Top) All three priming conditions produced mostly overlapping effects in a bilateral region of posterior angular gyrus. (Middle) The region of the left posterior occipitotemporal cortex showing an effect of morphological relatedness (purple) overlaps with the larger region of orthographic relatedness effect in this area (blue). (Bottom) The overlap between the morphological and semantic relatedness effects in the left middle temporal gyrus. Because these effects were on the lateral surface of the gyrus, they are shown on a 3D rendering of a brain to facilitate visualization. (Insets) The areas of interest in greater detail. (Right) Bar plots show the mean percent BOLD signal change (±SEM) for each condition in the corresponding regions of interest. The effect sizes are all negative to indicate reductions in activation from the unrelated word-pair condition.

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