Processing Syntax & Morphology: A Neruocognitive Perspective

This book reviews interdisciplinary work on the processing of syntax and morphology. Adopting a neurocognitive perspective, it focuses on the fundamental questions at the center of this research, for example which areas of the brain support the processing of syntactic and morphological information and which neurophysiological responses these processes engender; how syntax and morphology interact with other information types during real time language processing; and the degree to which neurolinguistic findings on syntactic and morphological processing are consistent with theoretical conceptions of syntax and morphology. The authors describe results obtained by means of neuroscientific methods (for example, functional magnetic resonance imaging or event-related brain potentials) and provide brief introductions to the methods themselves, with comparisons to findings from behavioral psycholinguistics undertaken where appropriate. They extend basic findings at the word and sentence level by a consideration of how the mental processing of syntax and morphology relates to prosody, discourse, semantics, and plausibility. The work is divided into four parts concerned with word structure, sentence structure, processing syntax and morphology at the interfaces, and a comparison of different models of syntactic and morphological processing in the neurocognitive domain. The book is directed at graduate students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology.