The role of the frequency of constituents in compound words: Evidence from Basque and Spanish

Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni; Perea, Manuel; Carreiras, Manuel

doi:10.3758/bf03193108

Cited by 54 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Whatever the disadvantages of our methodology may be, the pattern of results that we have obtained and reported either in the body of the paper or in Appendix 1, dovetails perfectly with many of the results obtained in the literature for sentential reading, such as visuo-oculomotor effects (cf., e.g., O'Regan et al, 1994;Rayner, 1998;Vitu, McConkie, Kerr & O'Regan, 2001), effects of compound length and frequency, as well as of constituent frequencies (cf., e.g., Andrews et al, 2004;Duñabeitia, Perea & Carreiras, 2007;Hyönä & Pollatsek, 1998;Hyönä et al, 2004;Juhasz et al, 2003;Taft & Forster, 1976), and effects of orthographic n-grams (reported in Appendix 1, cf., e.g., Lima & Inhoff, 1985). Furthermore, in a recent sentential reading study (Kuperman, Bertram & Baayen, 2008), in which Finnish compounds were embedded in context, a highly similar pattern of results was observed, including early effects of compound frequency, left constituent frequency and family size, later and weaker effects of right constituent frequency and family size, interactions between morphological predictors, as well as longitudinal experimental effects.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

Kuperman

Schreuder

Bertram

et al. 2009

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

185

218

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This paper reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2500 polymorpemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision, while readers' eye-movements were registered. We found evidence that both full-forms of compounds (dishwasher) and their constituent morphemes (e.g., dish, washer, er) and morphological families of constituents (sets of compounds with a shared constituent) played a role in compound processing. We observed simultaneous effects of compound frequency, left constituent frequency and family size early (i.e., before the whole compound has been scanned), and also effects of right constituent frequency and family size that emerged after the compound frequency effect. The temporal order of these and other effects that we observed goes against assumptions of many models of lexical processing. We propose specifications for a new multiple route model of polymorphemic compound processing, which is based on time-locked, parallel and interactive use of all morphological cues, as soon as they become (even partly) available to the visual uptake system. Keywords: morphological structure; lexical processing; eye movements; compounds 2 Current models of morphological processing and representation in reading have explored a wide range of logically possible architectures. Sublexical models hold that complex words undergo obligatory parsing and that lexical access proceeds via their morphemes (cf., Taft, 1991;Taft & Forster, 1975, 1976. Supralexical models, by contrast, argue that morphemes are accessed only after the compound as a whole has been recognized (e.g., Diependaele, Sandra & Grainger, 2005;Giraudo & Grainger, 2001). Dual route models hypothesize that full-form based processing goes hand in hand with decompositional processing. The two access routes are usually assumed to be independent (Allen & Badecker, 2002;Baayen & Schreuder, 1999;Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1992;Laudanna & Burani, 1995;Schreuder & Baayen, 1995), although an interactive dual route model has been proposed as well . In connectionist models such as the triangle model (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), morphological effects are interpreted as arising due to the convergence of orthographic, phonological and semantic codes. What all these theories have in common is that they were developed to explain data obtained with chronometric measures for isolated reading of bimorphemic complex words. As a consequence, they tend to remain silent about the time-course of information uptake in the reading of complex words.Establishing the temporal order of activation of full-forms (e.g., dishwasher) of complex words and of their morphological constituents (e.g., dish and washer) is critical for adjudicating between competing models of morphological processing. The present study addresses the time-course of morphological processing by considering the reading of long, polymorphemic Dutch compounds. Importantly, current models of morphological processing offer different 3 predictions with regard to the visual recognition of such compo...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

Kuperman

Schreuder

Bertram

et al. 2009

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

185

218

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Some studies have examined semantic effects in compound word decomposition by conducting a crosslanguage comparison in which compounding conventions differ between the languages (e.g., Jarema et al, 1999). This was the method used by Duñabeitia, Perea, and Carreiras (2007) with Basque and Spanish compounds. They orthogonally manipulated the frequencies of the first and second lexemes in a lexical decision task.…”

Section: Lexeme Meaning Dominancementioning

confidence: 99%

A database of 629 English compound words: ratings of familiarity, lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, age of acquisition, imageability, and sensory experience

2014

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Since the work of Taft and Forster (1976), a growing literature has examined how English compound words are recognized and organized in the mental lexicon. Much of this research has focused on whether compound words are decomposed during recognition by manipulating the word frequencies of their lexemes. However, many variables may impact morphological processing, including relational semantic variables such as semantic transparency, as well as additional form-related and semantic variables. In the present study, ratings were collected on 629 English compound words for six variables [familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance (LMD), imageability, and sensory experience ratings (SER)]. All of the compound words selected for this study are contained within the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007), which made it possible to use a regression approach to examine the predictive power of these variables for lexical decision and word naming performance. Analyses indicated that familiarity, AoA, imageability, and SER were all significant predictors of both lexical decision and word naming performance when they were added separately to a model containing the length and frequency of the compounds, as well as the lexeme frequencies. In addition, rated semantic transparency also predicted lexical decision performance. The database of English compound words should be beneficial to word recognition researchers who are interested in selecting items for experiments on compound words, and it will also allow researchers to conduct further analyses using the available data combined with word recognition times included in the English Lexicon Project.

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“…Taft and Forster (1976) claimed that the left constituent of a compound serves as the point of access to the meaning of the compound, while Juhasz, Starr, Inhoff, and Placke (2003) argued for the primacy of the right constituent (see also Duñ abeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2007). Several studies of Finnish compounds established the involvement of both the left and the right constituent in reading of compounds (cf., Hyö nä & Pollatsek, 1998;Pollatsek et al, 2000).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological dynamics in compound processing

Kuperman

Bertram

Baayen

2008

Language and Cognitive Processes

152

126

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The role of the frequency of constituents in compound words: Evidence from Basque and Spanish

Cited by 54 publications

References 30 publications

Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

A database of 629 English compound words: ratings of familiarity, lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, age of acquisition, imageability, and sensory experience

Morphological dynamics in compound processing

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