New Publication Alert from Dustin Chacón

Professor Dustin Chacón and colleagues just published a new paper ‘MEG evidence for left temporal and orbitofrontal involvement in breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together‘ in Cortex! This project was headed by Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado as part of the SAVaNT project, led by Linnaea Stockall. The study uses MEG to examine grammatical words and ungrammatical pseudowords in Tagalog, providing evidence for a multi-stage processing model of complex words: Morphologically complex words decompose in the left fusiform gyrus, followed by separate stages of category licensing in posterior temporal lobe and semantic interpretation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This research is particularly significant since it shows this general model of morphological processing applies to inflectional affixes (not only derivational affixes), and is the first to test this in Tagalog. Congratulations, Dustin!