Title: Humpty Dumpty's Problem: putting complex words back together again
Over the past 15 years, considerable evidence from a range of
different languages and methodologies has converged to provide clear
evidence that the early stages of visual word recognition involve a
mechanism of form-based morphological parsing, which
operates across all potentially morphologically complex words,
regardless of formal or semantic opacity (Rastle and Davis 2008, Lewis
et al 2011, Royle et al 2012, Fruchter et al 2014, inter alia).
Comparatively little attention, however, has been focused
on how linguistic processing proceeds once morphological constituents
have been identified.
In this talk I'll discuss the results of a number of recent and
ongoing experiments using MEG to investigate how we rapidly access
information about the constituents of morphologically complex words
including two (saw, jumped, outrun, thinkable) or three
(outran, unthinkable, reflatten) morphemes, and how we make use of this
information to reassemble the pieces and evaluate their syntactic and
semantic wellformedness. I'll focus much of the talk on 'fresh from the
lab' data from a project with Alec Marantz
(NYU) and Christina Manouilidou (UPatras) that we are just now
analysing, in which we are investigating the neural spatio-temporal
dynamics of access to the lexical category vs. argument structure
representations of verbal stems. I'll argue that by focusing
on the apparently simple question of how we detect and make use of
information about morphological constituents, we can gain significant
insight into the overall architecture of the human linguistic system.