Abstract:

Is morphology a discrete and independent element of lexical structure or does it simply reflect a fine tuning of the system to the statistical correlation that exists among the orthographic and semantic properties of words? Imaging studies in English failed to show unequivocal morphological activation that is distinct from semantic or orthographic activation. Cognitive research in Hebrew has revealed that morphological decomposition is an important component of print processing. In Hebrew, morphological relatedness does not necessarily induce a clear semantic relatedness, thus, Hebrew provides a unique opportunity to investigate the neural substrates of morphological processing. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants were required to perform judgment tasks of morphological relatedness, semantic relatedness, rhyming, and orthographic similarity. Half of the morphologically related words were semantically related and half were semantically unrelated. This desi

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