Seminar | How the Human Brain Breaks Words Apart to Understand Them: Insights from Tagalog Morphology

A central assumption in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic models of word recognition is that morphologically complex words are rapidly decomposed into smaller meaningful units, or morphemes. For example, teacher is processed as teach + -er, a procedure that supports efficient comprehension of both familiar and unfamiliar words (e.g., mistrustfulness).

Despite the importance of this decomposition process, our current understanding is based overwhelmingly on evidence from English and closely related Indo-European languages (Cayado & Rastle, 2025). This narrow empirical base limits our ability to determine how early morphological decomposition operates across languages, and which linguistic properties genuinely constrain it. Existing models variously emphasize the role of word edges, phonological or orthographic alternations, and the consistency of morphemic forms, yet these assumptions have not been tested in a wide variety of languages.

In this talk, I will present a series of behavioural and magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments in Tagalog that systematically test how these linguistic properties affect morphological decomposition. Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines, makes an important test-case since it has unique ways of forming complex words that are mechanistically different from suffixation in English. I will discuss how data from Tagalog challenge existing models of visual word recognition.