The recruitment of knowledge regarding plurality and compound formation during language comprehension

Abstract

Compound formation has been a major focus of research and debate in mental lexicon research. In particular, it has been widely observed that compounds with a regular plural non-head are dispreferred, and a long line of research has examined the nature of this constraint, including which morphological, semantic or phonological properties of the non-head underlie this dispreference. While it is typically assumed that this constraint in fact leads to the barring of a compound analysis to a noun-noun string which would otherwise violate the constraint, its implementation during sentence comprehension has not been thoroughly examined. Using self-paced reading, we demonstrate that knowledge of pluralization and compound formation is immediately utilized in the assignment of structure to noun-noun strings, and that the dispreference for regular plural non-heads in fact leads the parser away from the compound analysis in favor of a more complex grammatical alternative. These results provide new evidence for the online deployment of knowledge regarding pluralization and its interaction with compound formation, and inform our understanding of how morphological information is deployed during, and impacts real-time sentence comprehension.

Morphology constrains native and non-native word formation in different ways

“…These findings indicate that the morphological constraint (against -s plurals) affects how modifiers are structurally assigned inside compounds, with respect to both online processing and final interpretation. Similar findings have been reported from self-paced reading experiments for other kinds of attachments ambiguities involving pluralisation and compounding in L1 English (Grodner et al, 2002;Fiorentino et al, 2012).…”

“…Most previous studies have examined English (e.g. Alegre & Gordon, 1996;Berent & Pinker, 2007;Buck-Gengler, Menn & Healy, 2004;Clahsen & Almazan, 2001;Cunnings & Clahsen, 2007;Fiorentino, Bost, Abel & Zuccarelli, 2012;Gordon, 1985;Grodner, Gibson & Tunstall, 2002;Haskell, MacDonald & Seidenberg, 2003;Jaensch, Heyer, Gordon & Clahsen, 2014;Oetting & Rice, 1993;Ramscar & Dye, 2010;Silva, Gerth & Clahsen, 2013;van der Lely & Christian, 2000;Zukowski, 2005). The plurals-in-compounds effect is the result of a number of general constraints on word-formation and inflectional processes, which can be found in many languages.…”

Unconventional Expressions: Productive syntax in the L2 acquisition of formulaic language

“…This proposal has recently been tested in a series of intriguing experiments. Fiorentino and colleagues have investigated another type of multi-morphemic lexical item – nominal compounds – seeking to determine, among other things, whether compounds were faster or slower to process than single words (Fiorentino and Poeppel, 2007; Fiorentino and Fund-Reznicek, 2009; Fiorentino et al, 2012). Fiorentino and Poeppel (2007) matched pairs of items for whole-word log frequency, letter length, and syllabicity.…”