Work on the how we read words that contain derivational and inflectional morphology has contributed to a greater understanding of combinatorial structure in language.
In some of my early work I show that morphological and syntactic procesing produce similar patterns of brain activity, suggesting that these two systems engage cognitive processes with similar underlying neural substrates. In other work I demonstrated equivalent N250 priming effects for both regular and irregular verbs suggesting that lexical processing includes an early, automatic, visual word form based stage of morphological parsing that applies to all derivationally affixed words. These studies provide neurophysiological evidence supporting an account of language processing in which both regular and exceptional aspects of combinatorial morphosyntactic processes (like verb inflection) emerge from a single, integrated mechanism.
Related Manuscripts
Dávila, J., & Morris, J. (2018). From Orthography to Semantics: a Study of Morphological Processing through Deep Learning Neural Networks. 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.
Morris, J.,& Stockall, L. (2012). Early, equivalent ERP masked priming effects for regular and irregular morphology. Brain and language, 123(2), 8193.
Morris, J., & Holcomb, P. J. (2005). Event-related potentials to violations of inflectional verb morphology in English. Cognitive Brain Research, 25(3), 963-981.