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CNL Lunch Talks Hiromu Sakai
Morphological
Processing of Japanese Complex Verbs Thursday April 22nd, 2004, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall |
Native speakers
have a remarkable capacity to recognize and understand a linguistic
expression among a large number of phonologically or orthographically
related expressions. This capacity plays an essential role in the
morphological processing of Japanese, a language with a rich system
of complex verb morphology. As an inquiry into the cognitive
mechanisms underlying this capacity, we conducted an fMRI experiment
on Japanese morphological processing. Brain activations were measured
by a 1.5-T MRI system while twenty-two native speakers performed
grammaticality judgment tasks on Japanese sentences containing
complex verbs. The results indicate that complex verbs are first
decomposed into smaller morphemic units and then integrated into
larger syntactic structures, and that the left temporal cortex is
utilized in the decomposition and the left frontal cortex plays an
important role in the integration. We also report results of
behavioral (cross-modal priming) experiments and theoretical
(syntactic) researches on Japanese complex verbs, and discuss the
possibility of integrating researches based on these three
methodologies. |
