Investigation of the independence of morphology in visual word form recognition Michaela Harrow-Mortelliti * Maine School of Science and Mathematics,

Limestone, ME Elias Blinkoff * Glen Cove High School, Glen Cove, NY Laura Staum Casasanto, John E. Drury Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY * co-first authors The role of morphology (word-internal structure, e.g., kicked = [kick]+[-ed]; baker = [bake]+[-er]) in visual word processing is controversial. In one view, morphology plays a distinct role in word recognition. This perspective is supported by priming studies demonstrating that the processing of a given target word form is, indeed, facilitated by prime words that share its stem. However, an opposing view argues that this facilitation is due to the fact that morphologically related words tend to have a high semantic (meaning) and orthographic (form) overlap. Two experiments will make use of a masked priming paradigm (Fig.1) coupled with electrophysiological measurement techniques (EEG/ERPs), which should contribute important new data relevant to resolving this theoretical dispute. This entails recording the participants EEG activity which is time-locked to the TARGET word stimuli and displaying the prime stimuli (following a forward pattern Fig.1 mask, see Fig.1) at duration (40 ms) below the level of awareness. Two ERP components of interest in this study are the N400, a Table 1a negative-going waveform that reflects processing cost in access/retrieval of lexical/conceptual information, and the N250, which has been suggested to index processing at a stage where letter level information makes contact with whole word orthographic representations. Our lexical decision task involved selecting an item as a word or non-word (of which there are equal amounts). The purpose is to find out whether non-morphologically related primeTable 1b TARGET pairs with comparably high semantic and orthographic 2b overlap (+S+O) exhibit N400s and N250s in a manner similar to morphology (kept-KEEP) cases and repetition (keep-KEEP) cases (note morphological and repetition priming have been shown to elicit similar ERP and behavioral response patterns in previous work). This outcome would be consistent with the claim that morphological relationships can be reduced to mere form/meaning overlap. We designed two experiments in order to investigate these issues. The first (Table 1a) has six conditions: +S+O (there-HERE), -S+O (orthographic overlap only), -S-O (unrelated controls for the +S+O condition), +S-O (semantic overlap only), -S-O (unrelated controls for the repetition condition), and repetition conditions. The second experiment (Table 1b) compares the +S+O pairs (and matched S+O and -S-O cases) to cases of (irregular) past-tense/stem pairs (which have their own matched -S+O and -S-O control conditions. In the first experiment, we predict that the +S+O conditions N250 and N400 responses will look very similar to the repetition case, while the +S+O cases N250 and N400 effects in experiment two should look very much like those from the morphology condition. Our hope is that through the investigation of semantics and orthography, in relation to morphology, we will gain a better understanding the organization of the mental lexicon and its role in language processing generally. This work was supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation and the SUNY Research Foundation.