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The majority of words across the world’s languages consist of smaller meaningful units, or morphemes, which combine and recombine to create new words (e.g., mis-trust-ful-ness). Previous research shows that such words are processed in terms of these smaller units. Although psycholinguistics has made important advances in understanding this process of morphological decomposition, the field currently faces a serious limitation: most of what we know is based on English and other Indo-European languages (Cayado & Rastle, in prep). This reliance constrains our understanding of how morphological decomposition takes place and which linguistic factors modulate this process. Existing models of morphological processing variously assume that positional information, phonological and orthographic changes, phonological variability, and consistency in the orthographic and phonological forms of morphemes play a critical role during decomposition.
In this talk, I will present a series of behavioural and magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments that systematically test how these linguistic properties influence morphological decomposition. First, I exploit Tagalog infixation and pseudo-infixation to investigate the role of affix positional information in morphological processing (Cayado et al., 2023; in prep). Second, I examine morphophonological changes and variability in Tagalog—specifically nasal assimilation and substitution—to test how such changes, which obscure the boundary between prefix and stem, and the variability in their application, modulate the decomposition of morphologically complex words (Cayado et al., 2024, 2025). Third, I use Tagalog reduplication to examine how mismatches between orthographic and phonological forms affect morpheme recognition and activation (Wray et al., 2022; Cayado et al., in prep).
I will conclude by discussing how evidence from Tagalog challenges existing models of visual word recognition and outlining my plans to extend this work to reading acquisition, with the goal of informing the inclusion of morphology in reading curricula.
Bio: Dr. Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, Department of Psychology. His research delves into how morphologically complex words are processed and represented in the human mind and brain, with a particular focus on Tagalog. Employing behavioral experiments and neuroimaging techniques like magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography, he investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying morphological decomposition across different modalities. Dr. Cayado earned his PhD in Psycho/Neurolinguistics from Queen Mary University of London in 2024, where he explored the flexibility of morphological processing models through the lens of Tagalog morphology.
