Experimentation

The experimental portion of the project examines both (1) human performance on behavioural psycholinguistic tasks and (2) measurements of brain activity during such tasks. The former include word/nonword decisions, word recognition after being ‘primed’ by a related word, and general word relatedness judgments, among others. For the latter we use an electro-encephalograph (EEG) to record the electrical signals generated by the brain while participants are reading or listening to morphologically complex words during tasks such as those listed above. These recordings provide information on the time course of processingi.e., when different features of a word are registered in the brain—and allow us to untangle the parsing of morphological complexity from any accompanying phonological and semantic complexity.