Dartmouth Events

In the past 20 years that whenever we encounter words with multiple pieces like ‘teacher’ (i.e., morphologically complex words), the visual system decomposes these words into separate morphemes (i.e., teach- + -er) in the initial stage of word processing. We call this phenomenon ‘early and automatic decomposition’. However, the factors that might influence these early and automatic decomposition mechanisms remain under-investigated. In this talk, Dave will present 3 masked priming experiments in Tagalog, an Austronesian language that is heavily understudied in psycholinguistics, investigating how linear position of morphemes might affect early and automatic decomposition mechanisms. These experiments showed evidence that linear position of morphemes does influence the ease in which words are decomposed. The implications of these findings for theories of word processing will be discussed in the talk.

Dave is a Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. His research utilizes behavioral and neuroimaging methodology to explore questions like: how are complex words encoded in the human mind and brain -- as constituents or as whole words? What information does the human mind/brain use during this early, automatic, form-based decomposition mechanisms?

Reception to follow. Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and the Cognitive Science Program