The use of fMRI in research on language morphology

This chapter provides an overview of the literature that used fMRI to investigate the neuralprocessing and representation of morphologically complex words. We review studies oninflection, derivation, and compounding to show that the type of morphological complexity, inputmodality and task demands all combine to determine whether a complex word will engagecombinatorial processing in the left Inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), or primarily rely on the whole-word processing mechanisms in the bilateral language processing network. Jointly, these resultspoint to a system where general cross-linguistic mechanisms flexibly adapt to different linguisticcontexts to optimize lexical processing.