Neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a morphologically rich language : An fMRI study Lehtonen, M., Vorobyev, V.A., Hugdahl, K., Tuokkola T., Laine M.

Morphologically Complefl Words SING+ER+S Most Indo-European languages, such as English or French, use inflectional affixes to quite a limited extent. Finnish has abundant inflectional possibilities: a single noun in Finnish can have as many as 2000 different forms –HUONE+I+SSA+NNE+KIN –‘room’ + plural + ‘in’ + ‘your’ + ‘even’ –‘even in your rooms’

Morphological Decomposition When compared to otherwise matched monomorphemic words, Finnish morphologically complex words –are usually processed more slowly –with a greater probability of error. This suggests that morphological decomposition takes place during recognition of these words The recognition process of inflected words is assumed to require two major processing steps –early morphological decomposition at the visual word form level –integration of the meaning of the morphological constituents at the semantic-syntactic level.

Where is the Processing Cost? It could be at the early visual level or the semantic integration level. Hyönä et al. (2002) –suggests that the morphological effect derives from the more central, semantic-syntactic level. –They observed that the morphological effect seen with isolated inflected words vanished when the participants read the very same items embedded in neutral sentence contexts. This study uses fMRI data to answer this question.

Previous Neuroimaging Studies Two specific brain areas were identified as being involved in morphological processing. The left OTC (occipitotemporal cortex), especially the fusiform gyrus, involved in decomposition at the visual input level The LIFG (left inferior frontal gyrus) and/or the left pSTG/pMTG (posterior superior/middle temporal gyri), involved in integration of meaning of the morphological constituents that calls for semantic- syntactic processing

OTC and Fusiform Gyrus

left inferior frontal gyrus LIFG

posterior superior temporal gyrus pSTG

posterior middle temporal gyrus pMTG

So… Increased activation in the OTC should indicate work on morphological decomposition at the visual input level. Increased activation in the LIFG and/or pSTG/pMTG should indicate work on integration of meaning.

Methods Participants –12 right-handed students Materials –85 monomorphemic words –85 case-inflected nouns –170 pseudowords (half w/ inflection-like endings)

Methods Procedure –Lexical decision task –½ responded with left hand, ½ with right (why?) –The stimuli were projected onto a screen that the participants saw through an angled mirror fixated on the head coil. –Asterisk for 500 ms, 500ms blank, then stimulus work for up to 2000ms

Methods Procedure –34 30s task blocks 10 items per block (5 pseudowords, 5 words) 17 monomorphemic (MM) blocks 17 inflected (INFL) blocks MM (30s) INFL (30s) INFL (30s) MM (30s) REST (20s) REST (20s) REST (20s) REST (20s)

MRI Scanning fMRI is the use of MRI to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain

Results: Behavioral Data As expected, the inflected words elicited significantly longer reaction times than the monomorphemic words –(mean for monomorphemic, 763ms, SD 80; for inflected, 827, SD 88; t (11)D12.0, p<.001). The inflected items received also significantly higher error rates than the monomorphemic ones –(mean for monomorphemic, 2.84%, SD 3.93; for inflected, 5.36%, SD 5.80; t (11)=2.75, p=.02).

Results: fMRI Data

Discussion the contrast between inflected and monomorphemic items elicited clear activation increases in two of the three VOIs: in the LIFG and in the left temporal region. Because the two stimulus groups were carefully matched and the only relevant difference between them was morphological complexity, it is plausible that the behavioral and activation differences between the two item types (inflected vs. monomorphemic words) were caused by morpheme-based processing of the inflected items.

Discussion Semantic unification is assumed to be related to the function of the LIFG –LIFG activation in the present study may reflect the operations required for constructing a semantic-syntactic interpretation of the stem and affix combination on-line. Temporal areas have been assumed to play a crucial role in the memory component of language –Activation in the temporal VOI was expected to reflect activation of the representations of the stem and the affix –may also reflect the activation of the rules of the stem+affix combinability. –The fact that recognizing an inflected word involves accessing two types of information may also bring about increased activation in temporal areas when compared to monomorphemic words.

Discussion results do not rule out the possibility that the left OTC is indeed involved in segmenting the orthographic patterns into morphemic units and relaying the information for temporal regions for further analysis This process may simply be very fast and automatic, and the main processing load with inflected words stems from the later stages.

Discussion The neural correlates of morphological decomposition reflect either form- or meaning-related lexical access processes that are part and parcel of the recognition of any given word (albeit more complex for inflected words).

Questions In an fMRI study activation patterns seem to be compared in between a baseline condition (do nothing?) and a task condition. Then how do we compare two (or more than) two different task type conditions directly? My only question was whether (and how much) it matters that the words were all low and medium surface frequency - that places considerable limit on the extension of the findings, I think. They didn't really address the significance of that, rather, they just noted that high surface frequency helps predict full-form/decompositional processing.

Questions I don't know Finnish at all. So, it is amazing that Finnish can have as many as 2000 different forms of a single noun. How does it work? Why does Finnish benefit finding out the neural correlaton of morphological decomposition? Also, I am wondering if the effect could be resulted from working memory load but not morphology itself.

Questions Compared with Finnish, which has lots of inflectional possibilities, Mandarin, on the other hand, is inflection impoverished. Characters such as "LE", "ZHE" and "ZAI" is used in Mandarin to mark inflection. However, unlike other Indo- European languages, these characters in Mandarin are separate from the previous stem or words. Thus coming back to the topic of this paper, which states that left frontal regions and left superior or middle temporal areas the ones most commonly observed in studies of morphological processing, I was wondering if the same areas will be activated too?

Questions Since this paper was aiming to look at the morphological decomposition, I'm thinking maybe using words with similar orthography but different morphological structures would speak more to this issue? Other questions?