On the Representation and Processing of Compound Words: Automatic Access to Constituent Morphemes Does Not Occur

Abstract

Three lexical decision experiments using a variant of the semantic priming technique tested the hypothesis that compound words are morphologically decomposed during recognition. If a compound constituent is accessed during processing, an associative prime will facilitate that access and hence recognition of the whole word. Contrary to the predictions derived from the automatic decomposition hypothesis, Experiment 1 revealed no priming effects for semantically opaque compounds (buttercup) and pseudo-compounds (boycott), primed either on their initial or final constituent. The data from Experiment 2 suggested that both constituents in semantically transparent compounds are accessed (teaspoon). Experiment 3 was a replication experiment, confirming that final constituents of opaque compounds are not accessed, whereas those of transparent compounds are. The overall pattern of data refutes the notion of automatic morphological decomposition proposed by Taft and Forster (1976). However, a revised decomposition procedure would be compatible with the results. Morphemes might only be accessed if no other lexical representations match the orthographic description of the parsed stimulus part. In this account, only semantically transparent compounds lack an independent lexical representation.

Prosody-assisted head-driven access to spoken German compounds.

“…In the psycholinguistics literature, the various data obtained in visual word recognition using different experimental paradigms, such as cross-modal and unimodal priming, as well as in reading with different tasks (e.g., lexical decision, naming, eye movement monitoring, and progressive demasking) do not converge to an extent that they would allow a validation of one particular model (Andrews, 1986;Hyönä & Pollatsek, 1998;Inhoff, Radach, & Heller, 2000;Jarema, Busson, Nikolova, Tsapkini, & Libben, 1999;Kehayia et al, 1999;Libben, 1994;Monsell, 1985;Pollatsek, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2000;Sandra, 1990;Taft & Forster, 1976;Zwitserlood, 1994). Using visually presented nonwords, Taft and Forster (1976) showed that the response latencies in a lexical decision task were influenced by the lexical status as well as by the frequency of the left constituents.…”

Accessing Words from the Mental Lexicon

“…Semantically transparent compounds such as snowball fight are usually distinguished from semantically opaque compounds, which are not related to the meaning of their constituting morphemes (e.g. deadline keeping : Sandra 1990;Zwitserlood 1994). …”

Electrophysiological evidence for incremental lexical-semantic integration in auditory compound comprehension

“…That is, the meaning of each constituent is accessed during understanding a compound, presumably in order to integrate all constituent meanings. Sandra (1990) reported facilitated word recognition in Dutch, i.e. shorter reaction times for written compounds that were preceded by associatively related, written mono-morphemic nouns compared to compounds preceded by unrelated nouns.…”