Processing Syntax and Morphology: A Neurocognitive Perspective

This book reviews interdisciplinary work on the mental processing of syntax and morphology. It focuses on the fundamental questions at the centre of this research, for example whether language processing proceeds in a serial or a parallel manner; which areas of the brain support the processing of syntactic and morphological information; whether there are neurophysiological correlates of language processing; and the degree to which neurolinguistic findings on syntactic and morphological processing are consistent with theoretical conceptions of syntax and morphology. The authors describe the outcomes of methods in neurophysiology (for example, functional magnetic resonance imaging), behavioural psycholinguistics, and neuropsychological lesion studies, and provide brief introductions to the methods themselves. They extend basic findings at the word and sentence level by considering how the mental processing of syntax and morphology relates to prosody, discourse, semantics, and world knowledge. They have divided the work into four parts concerned with word structure, sentence structure, processing syntax and morphology at the interfaces, and a comparison of different models of syntactic and morphological processing in the neurophysiological domain. The book is directed at graduate students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, neurophysiology, and psychology.

Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky is Head of the Research Group Neurotypology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. She is the author of articles in a range of linguistic, psychological and neuroscientific journals, including Psychological Review, Brain Research Reviews, Human Brain Mapping, Cognition, and Lingua.
Matthias Schlesewsky is Professor of General Linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. He has published widely in the domains of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, with a particular focus on word order and the syntax-semantics interface. He is co-editor, with Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Fi??ry, and Ralf Vogel of Gradience in Grammar: Generative Perspectives (OUP, 2006).