  The EMC effect in deuterium and helium-3 is studied using a convolution
formalism that allows isolating the impact of high-momentum nucleons in
short-ranged correlated (SRC) pairs. We assume that the modification of the
structure function of bound nucleons is given by a universal (i.e. nucleus
independent) function of their virtuality, and find that the effect of such
modifications is dominated by nucleons in SRC pairs. This SRC-dominance of
nucleon modifications is observed despite the fact that the bulk of the nuclear
inelastic scattering cross-section comes from interacting with low-momentum
nucleons. These findings are found to be robust to model details including
nucleon modification function parametrization, free nucleon structure function
and treatment of nucleon motion effects. While existing data cannot
discriminate between such model details, we present predictions for measured,
but not yet published, tritium EMC effect and tagged nucleon structure
functions in deuterium that are sensitive to the neutron structure functions
and bound nucleon modification functions.
