We learn new words via our everyday reading experience, but the precise mechanisms behind this learning are still unclear. In this experiment we tracked the development of lexical representations in adults combining behavioural measures of lexical processing with EEG signatures of visual word sensitivity. Participants learned novel letter strings using two different routines, one based on the standard explicit procedure typically used in the literature, and one based on a more pro-active feedback-based learning.

Words can be decomposed into smaller meaningful units, known as morphemes (e.g., BUILD–ER). Available data suggest this to happen in rightfully complex words (e.g., deal-er), pseudo-complex words (e.g., corn-er), and also when the stimulus is a nonword composed of a real stem and a real affix (e.g., chair-er). On the contrary, the absence of an affix (e.g., cash-ew) seems to result in a lack of decomposition. Are affixes necessary to trigger morphological analysis?

Access to word meaning outside of awareness is generally accepted now, at least as indexed by masked priming. Yet, it is not clear what kind of information is grasped subliminally, and whether the mechanisms underlying conscious and unconscious semantic processing are the same. Here, we address  this issue by comparing the state-of-art Distributional Semantic Model (DSM), found to successfully predict a wide range of language-related phenomena, with Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), a measure of association between words based on their mere co-occurrence in language use.