Sometimes, the relationship between form and meaning in language is not one-to-one. Here, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to illuminate the neural correlates of such flexible syntax-semantics mappings during sentence comprehension by examining split-intransitivity. While some ("rigid") verbs consistently select one…

When two individual characters are introduced in discourse, it is often, but not always, possible to make anaphoric reference to them as a complex reference object via a plural pronoun. According to the Equivalence hypothesis, the circumstances under which such reference is possible depend on the equivalence of the characters. Various factors have…

This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the sixth MOrphological PROcessing Conference (MOPROC), which was kept in June 2009 in Turku, Finland. The issue contains 13 articles by leading scholars in the field of morphological processing. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and…

It is demonstrated that the meaning given to an ambiguous word (e.g., "stick") can be biased by the masked presentation of a polymorphemic word derived from that meaning (e.g., "sticky"). No bias in interpretation is observed when the masked prime is a word that is semantically related to the target with no morphological…

The present paper reports on a study that investigated the role of procedural and declarative memory in the acquisition of Finnish past tense morphology. Two competing models were tested. Ullman's (2004) declarative/procedural model predicts that procedural memory supports the acquisition of regular morphology, whereas declarative memory supports…

The word-superiority effect (WSE) describes the superior recognition of word constituents in a word, as opposed to a non-word, context. In this study, the WSE was used as a diagnostic tool to examine the modulatory effect of word semantic transparency on the degree to which Chinese bimorphemic compound words are lexically represented as unitised…

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, "glass-ness"). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were…

The syntactic bootstrapping mechanism of verb learning was evaluated against child-directed speech in Turkish, a language with rich morphology, nominal ellipsis and free word order. Machine-learning algorithms were run on transcribed caregiver speech directed to two Turkish learners (one hour every two weeks between 0;9 to 1;10) of different…

The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement…

This experiment examined event-related responses to targets preceded by semantically transparent morphologically related primes (e.g., farmer-farm), semantically opaque primes with an apparent morphological relation (corner-corn), and orthographically, but not morphologically, related primes (scandal-scan) using the masked priming technique…

Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or…

Two picture naming experiments show that compound word production in Mandarin Chinese and in English is determined by the compound's whole-word frequency, and not by its constituent morpheme frequency. Four control experiments rule out that these results are caused by recognition or articulatory processes. These results are consistent with models…

Two experiments compared how relatively long novel prefixed words (e.g., "overfarm") and existing prefixed words were processed in reading. The use of novel prefixed words allows one to examine the roles of whole-word access and decompositional processing in the processing of non-novel prefixed words. The two experiments found that,…

Sixteen-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), and those showing typical language development (TD) responded to target words in sentences that were either grammatical or contained a grammatical error immediately before the target word. The TD participants showed the expected slower response times…