Morphological encoding in language production: Electrophysiological evidence from Mandarin Chinese compound words

PLoS ONE, vol. 19, pp. e0310816

Abstract

This study investigates the role of morphology during speech planning in Mandarin Chinese. In a long-lag priming experiment, thirty-two Mandarin Chinese native speakers were asked to name target pictures (e.g., "" /shan1/ "mountain"). The design involved pictures referring to morpheme-related compound words (e.g., "" /shan1yang2/ "goat") sharing a morpheme with the first (e.g., "" /shan1/ "mountain") or the second position of the targets (e.g., /nao3/ "brain" with prime /dian4nao3/ "computer"), as well as unrelated control items. Behavioral and electrophysiological data were collected. Interestingly, the behavioral results went against earlier findings in Indo-European languages, showing that the target picture naming was not facilitated by morphologically related primes. This suggests no morphological priming for individual constituents in producing Mandarin Chinese disyllabic compound words. However, targets in the morpheme-related word condition did elicit a reduced N400 compared with targets in the morpheme-unrelated condition for the first position overlap in the ERP analyses but not for the second, suggesting automatic activation of the first individual constituent in noun compound production. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Authors 3

1. Jiaqi Wang Aachen Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

   Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

2. Niels Olaf Schiller Aachen Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

   Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

3. Rinus Gerardus Verdonschot corresponding

   Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

   Affiliation as printed

   Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI), Nijmegen, the Netherlands