Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Poster Slams
The Influence of Concreteness of Morphome on the Integration of Compound Words：Evidence from Event-Related Potential
Poster C6 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Wenqi Cai1, Yun Qi1, Fakun Chen1, Rui Zhang1, Xiaojuan Wang1, Jianfeng Yang1; 1Shaanxi Normal University
Previous electrophysiological studies offered ample evidence of the activation of morpho-semantic information in the early stage of visual compound word recognition. However, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying subsequent integration after morpho-semantic activation have not been fully elucidated yet. In particular, little is known about what and how morpho-semantic information involves in semantic integration processing. With the event-related potential (ERP) technology and a within-participants design of 2 (morphemic concreteness: concrete vs. abstract) × 2 (semantic transparency: transparent vs. opaque), the present study investigated the neural dynamic activation process of morphemic perceptual-motor features and how they are involved in semantic integration processing, to further reveal the essence of morpho-semantic integration. Participants were instructed to complete a visual lexical decision task. ERP results found that the concreteness effect appeared in both the first and second morphemes processing, preliminarily proving the activation of perceptual-motor features in morphemic decomposition. Specifically, the first concrete morphemes induced a smaller P250 amplitude than the first abstract morphemes in the right electrode sites; the second concrete morphemes induced a smaller N400 amplitude than the second abstract morphemes in the posterior electrode sites. Semantic transparency effect was found in the second morpheme processing, manifested in that transparent compound words evoked smaller N400 amplitude than opaque compound words in the whole-brain electrodes sites. It suggested that the activation of the meaning of transparent morphe- mes could facilitate the compound processing because the integrated meaning was relatively similar to the stored meaning, while the integrated meaning conflicted with the stored meaning in the processing opaque compound words. More importantly, there was a significant interaction between semantic transparency and morphemic concreteness in the processing of second morphemes, manifested in that transparent compound words containing concrete morphemes induced smaller N400 amplitude than transparent compound words containing abstract morphemes, and exhibited no significant difference in amplitude between opaque compounds containing concrete morphemes and opaque compounds containing abstract morphemes. The results showed that the perceptual-motor features of morphemes were involved in the coherent morpho-semantic integration and abundant perceptual-motor features of morphemes facilitated the acquisition and integration of whole-word semantic representations. Transparent compound words containing concrete morphemes activated more perceptual-motor features which overlapped with whole-word features, thus the integration of perceptual-motor features of morphemes could further facilitate the acquisition of whole-word semantic representations. The results provided direct evidence for the involvement of morpheme perceptual-motor features in morpho-semantic integration processing at the neurophysiological level, and enriched the neural mechanism research of visual compound word representation processing.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Morphology