Abstract: Whether morphology functions as an independent linguistic aspect during word recognition remains hotly debated. A large number of behavioral studies have revealed that the decomposition and combination of morphologically complex words underlies the cognitive mechanism of morphological processing. Brain imaging provides a critical tool for investigating the role of morphological processing and its neural basis: the left inferior frontal gyrus is an important correlate of morphological processing, and morphologically related words are associated with reduced amplitude of the N400 ERP component. However, Chinese morphology is distinct from alphabetic languages as morphemes are only differentiable based on the whole word context. Given the large number of homophones in Chinese it is, therefore, critical to investigate Chinese morphological processing of spoken words.

Key words: morphological processing, decomposition and combination, the left inferior frontal gyrus