Dissertation: Morphology and Spoken Word Comprehension (Dirk Koester)

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Dissertation

Morphology and Spoken Word Comprehension: Electrophysiological Investigations of Internal Compound Structure

Dirk Koester, Ph.D. (awarded by Leipzig University, Dept. of Psychology)

Download an electronic copy here (pdf format; 13 MB) or there (No. 47).

I gratefully acknowledge the supervision of Thomas C. Gunter & Angela D. Friederici!

Summary

The present work investigated morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic aspects of German compounds in auditory word comprehension. Previous studies were conducted in the visual modality or else concentrated exclusively on semantic aspects. The question of whether and how compound constituents are accessed from the mental lexicon during auditory comprehension was addressed in five experiments using the method of recording event-related potentials. In order to see whether compounds are decomposed, the availability of morphosyntactic gender information of initial and last constituents was determined whereby the last constituent determines all (morpho)syntactic features of a compound in German. In a next step, the processing of linking elements, which are often identical with plural morphemes, was explored. The relevant question here was whether or not initial constituents marked with a linking element might be processed as plural forms. In addition, the comparison of easy vs. difficult to integrate novel compounds, and semantically transparent vs. opaque compounds provides evidence concerning the temporal dimension of lexical-semantic integration of compound constituents.

The first experiment established the left-anterior negativity (LAN) as a reliable marker for the decomposition in novel compounds. A LAN was observed in response to initial and last constituents if they were gender incongruent. A second experiment replicated this effect for low-frequency transparent and opaque compounds, and a control experiment suggests that the effects are not due to the experimental set-up. While these gender effects suggest morphosyntactic decomposition, an N400 effect of number incongruity could be observed only for the last constituents. That is, linking elements do not function as plural morphemes.

In a follow-up experiment the null effect in response to linking elements was shown to be due to prosodic cues that differentiate compounds from single nouns. The lexical-semantic integration of constituents is suggested to begin during the final constituent, which mostly determines the semantic category of the compound. Difficult and transparent compounds elicited a negativity with an N400-like scalp distribution in comparison to easy and opaque compounds, respectively. It is suggested that prosodic cues are used to initiate the morphosyntactic decomposition of compounds. However, morphosyntactic representations are not specified for number by linking elements, and the lexical-semantic integration begins during the last constituent.