Abstract #3282

Bick A, Goelman G, Frost R

Our study provides evidence concerning the existence of morphological related activity in an explicit task design. Using fMRI we identified two locations involved in morphological deposition of visually presented words and showed that this activity does not result from the joint contribution of orthographic and semantic properties. Since our results show activation that is independent of semantic overlap, the possibility that this activations results from semantic factors alone seems unlikely. These results coincide with the behavioral data previously obtained in Hebrew, demonstrating the important role of morphological processing in reading, thereby suggesting that morphological analysis is an independent language process.