Electrophysiological correlates of morphological processing in Chinese compound word recognition

The present study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of morphological processing in Chinese compound word reading using a delayed repetition priming paradigm. Participants were asked to passively view lists of two-character compound words containing prime-target pairs separated by a few items. In a Whole Word repetition condition, the prime and target were the same real words (e.g., , manager-manager). In a Constituent repetition condition, the prime and target were swapped in terms of their constituent position (e.g., , the former is a pseudo-word and the later means nurse). Two ERP components including N200 and N400 showed repetition effects. The N200 showed a negative shift upon repetition in the Whole Word condition but this effect was delayed for the Constituent condition. The N400 showed comparable amplitude reduction across the two priming conditions. The results reveal different aspects of morphological processing with an early stage associated with N200 and a late stage with N400. There was also a possibility that the N200 effect reflect general cognitive processing, i.e., the detection of low-probability stimuli.

[1]  L. Feldman.  Modeling Morphological Processing , 2013 .

[2]  G. Libben,et al.  Conceptions and questions concerning morphological processing , 2004, Brain and Language.

[3]  H. Semlitsch,et al.  A solution for reliable and valid reduction of ocular artifacts, applied to the P300 ERP. , 1986, Psychophysiology.

[4]  R. Holloway.  The broth in my brother ’ s brothel : Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition , 2005 .

[5]  Kathleen Rastle,et al.  ERP Evidence of Morphological Analysis from Orthography: A Masked Priming Study , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[6]  Gary Libben,et al.  Semantic Transparency in the Processing of Compounds: Consequences for Representation, Processing, and Impairment , 1998, Brain and Language.

[7]  Zhuo Fang,et al.  Centro-parietal N200: An event-related potential component specific to Chinese visual word recognition , 2012 .

[8]  W. Badecker.  Processing compound words: An introduction to the issues , 2007, Brain and Language.

[9]  István Czigler,et al.  Aging, stimulus identification and the effect of probability: an event-related potential study , 1996, Biological Psychology.

[10]  M. de Vega,et al.  Event-related Brain Potentials Elicited by Morphological, Homographic, Orthographic, and Semantic Priming , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[11]  Jenn-Yeu Chen,et al.  Morphological encoding in the production of compound words in Mandarin Chinese , 2006 .

[12]  Riitta Salmelin,et al.  Neural dynamics of reading morphologically complex words , 2009, NeuroImage.

[13]  R. Henson,et al.  Neural response suppression, haemodynamic repetition effects, and behavioural priming , 2003, Neuropsychologia.

[14]  R. C. Oldfield.  The assessment and analysis of handedness: the Edinburgh inventory. , 1971, Neuropsychologia.

[15]  Matthew H. Davis,et al.  The broth in my brother’s brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition , 2004, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[16]  A. Friederici,et al.  Prosody-assisted head-driven access to spoken German compounds. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[17]  A. Rodríguez-Fornells,et al.  Event-related brain responses to morphological violations in Catalan. , 2001, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[18]  C. McBride-Chang,et al.  The processing of morphological structure information in Chinese coordinative compounds: An event-related potential study , 2010, Brain Research.

[19]  R. Baayen,et al.  Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model , 1997 .

[20]  Helen L Jamison,et al.  Morphology and the internal structure of words. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[21]  M. S. Snaith,et al.  Benefits and Costs , 1998 .

[22]  K. Forster,et al.  Lexical storage and retrieval of prefixed words , 1975 .

[23]  Jonathan R. Folstein,et al.  Influence of cognitive control and mismatch on the N2 component of the ERP: a review. , 2007, Psychophysiology.

[24]  Steven Pack,et al.  Benefits and costs. , 2005, Nursing standard (Royal College of Nursing (Great Britain) : 1987).

[25]  Kara D. Federmeier,et al.  Thirty years and counting: finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). , 2011, Annual review of psychology.

[26]  Gary Libben,et al.  Ambiguous Novel Compounds and Models of Morphological Parsing , 1999, Brain and Language.

[27]  William D. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Differentiating Morphology, Form, and Meaning: Neural Correlates of Morphological Complexity , 2007, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[28]  A. Caramazza,et al.  Dissociation of inflectional and derivational morphology , 1988, Brain and Language.

[29]  S. E. Napps,et al.  Morphemic relationships in the lexicon: Are they distinct from semantic and formal relationships? , 1989, Memory & cognition.

[30]  J. Ford,et al.  Event-related potentials recorded from young and old adults during a memory retrieval task. , 1979, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[31]  M. Laine,et al.  L1 effects on the processing of inflected nouns in L2. , 2008, Acta psychologica.

[32]  M. Penke,et al.  How the brain processes complex words: an event-related potential study of German verb inflections. , 1997, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[33]  L. Osterhout,et al.  Morphological decomposition involving non-productive morphemes: ERP evidence , 2003, Neuroreport.

[34]  A. Kok.  Effects of degradation of visual stimuli on components of the event-related potential (ERP) in go/nogo reaction tasks , 1986, Biological Psychology.

[35]  J. Grainger,et al.  An Electrophysiological Study of the Effects of Orthographic Neighborhood Size on Printed Word Perception , 2002, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[36]  P. Gordon,et al.  Frequency Effects and the Representational Status of Regular Inflections , 1999 .

[37]  A. Friederici,et al.  Morphosyntax, Prosody, and Linking Elements: The Auditory Processing of German Nominal Compounds , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[38]  Lars Borin,et al.  What is a lexical representation? , 1985, NODALIDA.

[39]  Joan L. Bybee,et al.  Regular morphology and the lexicon. , 1995 .

[40]  P. Zwitserlood,et al.  Where and How Morphologically Complex Words Interplay with Naming Pictures , 2002, Brain and Language.

[41]  S. Bentin,et al.  The Contribution of Morphological and Semantic Relatedness to Repetition Priming at Short and Long Lags: Evidence from Hebrew , 1990, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[42]  Xuchu Weng,et al.  Semantic processing of Chinese in left inferior prefrontal cortex studied with reversible words , 2004, NeuroImage.

[43]  I. Gauthier,et al.  Visual priming: The ups and downs of familiarity , 2000, Current Biology.

[44]  Christina L. Gagné,et al.  Benefits and costs of lexical decomposition and semantic integration during the processing of transparent and opaque English compounds , 2011 .

[45]  C. Semenza,et al.  The electrophysiological correlates of Noun–Noun compounds , 2007, Brain and Language.

[46]  Jon Andoni Duñabeitia,et al.  ERP correlates of inhibitory and facilitative effects of constituent frequency in compound word reading , 2009, Brain Research.

[47]  A. A. Wijers,et al.  Inhibition, response mode, and stimulus probability: a comparative event-related potential study , 2002, Clinical Neurophysiology.

[48]  Danling Peng,et al.  Decomposed Storage in the Chinese Lexicon , 1992 .

[49]  J. Segui,et al.  Morphological priming without morphological relationship , 2003 .

[50]  P. Hagoort,et al.  The suppression of repetition enhancement: A review of fMRI studies , 2013, Neuropsychologia.

[51]  D. Schacter,et al.  Reductions in cortical activity during priming , 2007, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[52]  Eileen M. Napoliello,et al.  Neural basis of single‐word reading in Spanish–English bilinguals , 2012, Human brain mapping.

[53]  D. Poeppel,et al.  Processing of compound words: An MEG study , 2007, Brain and Language.

[54]  R. Frackowiak,et al.  Demonstrating the implicit processing of visually presented words and pseudowords. , 1996, Cerebral cortex.

[55]  William D. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Words, Morphemes, and Syllables in the Chinese Mental Lexicon. , 1994 .

[56]  Suiping Wang,et al.  Electrophysiological evidence for relation information activation in Chinese compound word comprehension , 2013, Neuropsychologia.