Clara Cuonzo in Cognitive Neuropsychology

On "blueberries" and "fingerprints".

Congratulations to recent alum Clara Cuonzo, whose paper with advisor Ellen Lau and RA Allison Macdonald, "Blueberries and fingerprints: ERP insights into compound structure in production," has just appeared in Cognitive Neuropsychology. The paper, abstracted below, gives ERP evidence from priming for structure in compounds that is not merely phonological, and brings this conclusion to bear on our understanding of aphasia. Related themes are explored in Clara's 2025 dissertation thesis: Disentangling morphosyntax from morphophonology: A reevaluation of moprhological priming.

Prior neuropsychological work provides evidence for morphological complexity in the production of compounds, but questions remain about its locus. We investigate this here by comparing behavioral and ERP picture naming responses of English compounds when preceded by morphological, semantic, and phonological auditory primes. Morphological priming significantly speeded compound naming relative to other conditions, and ERPs showed differences in timing and distribution: morphological priming resulted in a reduced centro-posterior negativity, phonological priming resulted in a late-onset increased frontal negativity, and semantic priming showed only a numerical tendency towards an N400 reduction. These results are consistent with the view that compound production requires operations over morphosyntactic and morphophonological parts, both of which may be responsible for the systematic errors of compound production observed in many patients with aphasia. Such data provide further support for a shift away from a simple dichotomy between lexical activation and sentence production in models of aphasia.