Alternative accounts make fundamentally different claims regarding what the basic units of lexical knowledge are, and regarding the nature of the operations that these basic units undergo. Fiorentino will present findings from a set of studies examining the processing of lexicalized and novel morphologically complex words, utilizing psycholinguistic methods as well as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The results from these studies suggest that complex word recognition makes recourse to representational primitives below the word level (morpheme representations) and combinatorial processes operating on these representational primitives in the general case. These findings highlight the potential of cognitive neuroscience research examining both lexicalized and novel complex words to inform our understanding of the nature and neural bases of lexical knowledge. 

Lunch will be served.