Blueberries and fingerprints: ERP insights into compound structure in production

Prior neuropsychological work provides evidence for morphological complexity in the production of compounds, but questions remain about its locus. We investigate this here by comparing behavioral and ERP picture naming responses of English compounds when preceded by morphological, semantic, and phonological auditory primes. Morphological priming significantly speeded compound naming relative to other conditions, and ERPs showed differences in timing and distribution: morphological priming resulted in a reduced centro-posterior negativity, phonological priming resulted in a late-onset increased frontal negativity, and semantic priming showed only a numerical tendency towards an N400 reduction. These results are consistent with the view that compound production requires operations over morphosyntactic and morphophonological parts, both of which may be responsible for the systematic errors of compound production observed in many patients with aphasia. Such data provide further support for a shift away from a simple dichotomy between lexical activation and sentence production in models of aphasia.