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Affix semantic typicality facilitates word processing: MEG evidence from Arabic
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Poster A31 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Marianne Azar1, Alec Marantz1,2; 1New York University, 2New York University Abu Dhabi
Understanding words involves parsing them into minimally meaningful units. The word bakery has two morphemes, a root bake and a suffix (-e)ry combining to form a place. The fact that we can understand novel words based on their constituents (e.g: ‘bagelry’) suggests that we rely on associations with other words’ meanings and their constituents. One may guess that ‘bagelry’ refers to a place for bagels, relying on the semantic typicality of -(e)ry words, many of which are place words: bakery, roastery, gallery, etc. There is room for error though, as -ery produces non-place words that are just as frequent. Slavery, savagery are not places for slaves or savages, but concepts. Machinery, jewelry are not places for machines or jewels, but collections. In this neurolinguistic study, we assess the role of affix semantic typicality in word comprehension beyond form-based processing. For this, we use Arabic, where words are minimally composed of a consonantal root and a word-pattern affix, and the phenomenon of affix semantic typicality is widespread and productive. 26 Levantine Arabic speakers participated in an MEG-recorded continuous lexical decision task of 660 stimuli. Within the task, we exploit a double dissociation in the semantic typicality of two affixes. The first pattern’s (maCCaCa, where the root consonants fill the open C slots) words typically denote tools, though atypically denote places, and vice versa for the second pattern (maCCaC). The four conditions crossing meaning and pattern were controlled for word frequency. To examine the impact of an affix's semantic typicality on word processing, we compared typical and atypical words for each affix in spatiotemporal regions/times involved in lexeme processing and semantic recombination. We also compared different lexicality conditions for the same affixes, with two types of pseudowords: existing root-affix combinations, and non-root-affix combinations. Regions implicated in form-based processing and in semantic composition were included as ROIs in saptiotemporal cluster analysis. We found early typicality effects of semantic composition at the temporal pole, with more activity for typical words at 153-176 ms (p=0.024). In the superior temporal gyrus/middle temporal gyrus, we found an interaction effect of typicality and category/word-pattern (peak for tools/ maCCaCa) at 138-160 ms (p=0.019). In this same area, a reversal of this interaction effect is seen later at 362-398 ms (a peak for maCCaC/typical-place words, p=0.0067)). The early typicality effects are consistent with previous phrase-level semantic composition findings (Bemis & Pylkkanen, 2011). For our lexicality contrasts, we find a significant difference, in decreasing order of activity, among the processing of words, non-root words, and existing-root words early in the STG/MTG (143-215 ms, p=0.022) and later in the ventral temporal lobe (431-521 ms, p=0.0074), a word superiority effect similar to the sentence superiority effect (Snell & Grainger, 2017). This first neurolinguistic study assessing the role of affix semantic typicality finds semantic composition effects not only in semantic composition areas, but critically, in areas previously associated with form-based processing, alongside effects of word lexicality similar to sentence superiority.
Topic Areas: Morphology, Meaning: Lexical Semantics