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Neurolex Group
Neurocognitive systems for morpho-lexical analysis: The cross-linguistic foundations for language comprehension
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Research summary
Language comprehension is a fundamentally dynamic process, where the incoming speech stream is continuously segmented into a sequence of words and morphemes (Marslen-Wilson, 1973; 1975). This speech information interfaces with two markedly different neuro-cognitive processing systems – a left lateralised fronto-temporal system that is critical for key linguistic processes of morpho-syntactic analysis, and a more distributed bi-hemispheric system that supports the computation of the broader semantic and pragmatic interpretation of the incoming utterance (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 2007; Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 2008). This view of the neurocognitive language system has emerged from converging interdisciplinary research in psycholinguistics, neuro-psychology and cognitive neuroscience, primarily based on English. The research proposed here aims to take our understanding of these systems to a new level of generality by conducting parallel investigations in three strongly contrasting language systems (English, Arabic, and Polish), while achieving a new level of specificity in terms of the specific spatio-temporal pattern of different language processing procedures across the brain.
The first strand (English) will use behavioural and neuro-imaging techniques (fMRI, MEG) to analyse the neural networks engaged by different aspects of morpho-lexical complexity during the perception of words and phrases. The studies will contrast specifically linguistic forms of complexity (derivational and inflectional morphology, argument structure, etc.) with non-linguistic sources of complexity reflecting processing competition between different lexical and phrasal interpretations. Research in English suggests that these forms of complexity engage different processing systems across the two hemispheres. The second strand (Polish), using the same techniques, examines the neural dynamics of the same sources of processing complexity in a language which is morphologically much richer, but which shares with English the same concatenative word-formation mechanisms. The third strand (Arabic) will analyse neural responses to processing complexity in the radically different morpho-lexical environment of the Semitic languages, where the fundamental mechanism of word formation is non-concatenative, and where the key grammatical morpheme (the word-pattern) serves multiple linguistic functions. These cross-linguistic neuro-cognitive comparisons will provide important new information about the relationship between language and the brain.
References
- Marslen-Wilson, WD (1973) Nature, 244, 522-523
- Marslen-Wilson, WD (1975) Science, 189, 226-228
- Marslen-Wilson, WD & Tyler, LK (2007) Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 362, 823-836
- Tyler, LK & Marslen-Wilson, WD (2008) Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 363, 1037-1054