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Abstract
Neuroimaging studies provide mixed evidence for morphological decomposition in the brain, with results spanning reading and listening. This study examines how the brain processes complex, pseudocomplex, and simplex words using high-density EEG (HD-EEG) with source reconstruction. Subjects completed a lexical decision task in four modalities: text, audio, audio-video (AV), and silent video. We applied a representational similarity analysis (RSA) to compare neural activation with theoretical models of morphological structure and semantic representations derived from distributional word embeddings. Our findings suggest the activation of (pseudo)stems during reading, supporting a model of full decomposition. We report additional effects of decomposition in the audio and AV conditions, following the morphological disambiguating point. No morphological effects were observed during lipreading.