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Tracking subparts of words without clear boundaries: Evidence from EEG in Tagalog
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Samantha Wray1, Dave Cayado2, Rémi Lamarque3, Rowan Stewart3, Linnaea Stockall3; 1Dartmouth College, 2Royal Holloway, University of London, 3Queen Mary, University of London
Previous studies from various languages have shown that morphologically complex words undergo early, form-based decomposition within the first ~200ms of word recognition (M170), localized in the left fusiform gyrus, (the Visual Word Form Area – VWFA). Neural activity within this time window correlates with measures of morphological complexity (i.e., stem:whole word transition probability), suggesting that the brain tracks meaningful subparts during early visual word recognition (Cayado et al., 2024, 2025; Wray et al., 2022; Stockall et al., 2019; Lewis et al., 2011; Solomyak & Marantz, 2010). Cayado et al. (2025) further demonstrated that this early decomposition process is more robust than previously assumed: even prefixed words with opaque {prefix}+{stem} boundaries are subject to decomposition. However, evidence for decomposition within the first 200ms of seeing the word has largely relied on magnetoencephalography (MEG), which is not widely accessible. The present study replicates Cayado et al. (2025) using electroencephalography (EEG), a more affordable and widely available method, to address two questions: (1) Can early morphological decomposition within the first 200 ms be detected using EEG? (2) Do phonological alternations and morphophonological variability modulate early decomposition? Twenty native Tagalog speakers will perform a visual lexical decision task while 64-channel EEG records neural activity. This task has three conditions, all involving the prefixes paN- or maN-: (a) NOCHANGE; words that do not exhibit phonological alternations (e.g., paN + halo ‘mixer’ = panghalo); (b) Nasal-ASSIMILATED: the nasal N is pronounced as /m/ or /n/ to match with the place of articulation of the stem initial obstruent (e.g., paN + pook ‘district’ = pampook); (c) Nasal-SUBSTITUTED: the prefix-final nasal and the stem-initial obstruent are substituted by a single phoneme that is homorganic to the original obstruent (e.g., maN + palo ‘slap’ = mamalo). SUBSTITUTION makes the boundary between the prefix and stem opaque, while the boundary remains transparent for NOCHANGE and ASSIMILATION. If the correlational approach used in MEG studies generalizes to EEG, we expect a significant correlation between stem:whole word transition probability and EEG signals within the first 200 ms. If early decomposition is sensitive to boundary transparency, this correlation should be present in NOCHANGE and ASSIMILATION but absent in SUBSTITUTION. If, however, early decomposition is unaffected by boundary transparency, the correlation should emerge across all conditions, replicating Cayado et al. (2025). This study makes two contributions: first, it tests whether MEG-based findings on early morphological decomposition can be replicated using EEG; second, it evaluates the robustness of early morphological processing under conditions of reduced morphological transparency.
Topic Areas: Morphology, Phonology