CNL Lunch Talks

Robert Fiorentino

Studies on morphological and semantic structure

and the lexicon

Thursday March 18th, 2004, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

In this talk I will present studies on the representation of morphologically complex items (noun-noun compounds) and semantically ambiguous items (polysemous words and homonyms) using behavioral (lexical decision) and electrophysiological (MEG) measures. In each case, I would like to show that we can understand the representation and processing of these items in the mental lexicon in light of how theoretically motivated predictions could be spelled out for processing. The results of the studies support a decompositional account of compound word structure and a distinction among the lexical entries of polysemous words and homonyms. I would like to discuss remaining problems of interpretation for these results.