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Poster E36, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall

Automatic decomposition revisited with MEG evidence from visual processing of Tagalog circumfixes, infixes, and reduplication

Samantha Wray1, Linnaea Stockall2, Alec Marantz1,3;1New York University Abu Dhabi, 2Queen Mary University of London, 3New York University

Morphologically complex words are decomposed in the visual system based their formal properties, such that even words which orthographically imitate a morphological form (e.g. brother) are decomposed automatically in the visual word form area (VWFA) in anterior fusiform gyrus (Rastle et al. 2004, Lewis et al. 2011). Decomposition effects have also been found for irregular complex words (eg. bought) (Fruchter et al., 2013) and for words with otherwise unattested stems (eg. excursion) (Gwilliams & Marantz 2018). However, the current inventory of demonstrated influences on this process is incomplete, which the current study aims to address by posing two questions. First, are words which are morphologically complex in ways beyond affixation automatically decomposed? Second, are words which phonologically conform to the appearance of morphological complexity despite being morphologically simple decomposed by the visual system as well? For example, the vowel preceding a word-final consonant in Tagalog is realized as [o] but is [u] in other positions. Reduplicated words can exhibit non-transparent application of this rule to retain identity between the base and reduplicant morphemes (e.g. boboto “shall vote”; stem boto “vote”). There are two types of pseudoreduplicants: one of them applies the rules of Tagalog phonology transparently (Wilbur 1973, McCarthy 1995). The pseudoreduplicant dubdob “feeding a fire” conforms to this phonological rule. The second type of pseudoreduplicant does not apply these rules transparently. The word gonggong “fish”, for example, does not exhibit transparent application of the o->u rule; it retains /o/ in both positions. Participants (n=20) performed a visual lexical decision task in seven conditions: (1) reduplicated words, and (2) pseudoreduplicated words which imitate reduplicated words [+i], and (3) pseudoreduplicants which do not [-i, (4) circumfixed words (5) infixed words with the infix /-in-/ (6) pseudoinfixed words with an orthophonemic string /in/ in a typologically appropriate position for an infix (7) morphologically simple words. Magneto-encephalography was recorded concurrently and activity from the VFMA was visually inspected to identify the M170 (arguably the response from the VWFA shown to be sensitive to decomposition). Activity from 150-200ms after presentation was analyzed; LMEM results show that TP modulates activity (when word length and base frequency are constant) for reduplicated, circumfixed, and infixed words. Additional LMEM were then built to predict the activity of the pseudocomplex forms and predictions were compared to observed values. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that [+i] pseudoreduplicates which phonologically imitate reduplicated words are also automatically decomposed, but [-i] pseudoreduplicates are not. Additionally, pseudoinfixed words are not automatically decomposed in contrast with [+i] pseudoreduplicated words. In sum, this study has several implications for the study of processing morphologically complex written words in isolation. First, reduplication, circumfixation and infixation are comparable to more widely-studied suffixation in that properties relating the words’ constituents modulate activity during word recognition, indicating they are automatically parsed by the visual system. Second, phono-orthographic cues aid this process even the absence of an isolable stem or morphosyntactic rule. Furthermore, this study contributes to cross-linguistic evidence that underlying grammar, here morphophonological, influences early visual word processing.

Themes: Morphology, Reading
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)

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