Word structure and decomposition effects in reading

Abstract

Theories on the processing of compound words differ on the role attributed to access to individual constituents. These theories are mostly based on empirical evidence obtained in experimental settings that could induce artificial effects normally not occurring in natural processing. In this study we investigated the processing of compounds as compared to noncompound complex words in Italian through a reading task with eye movement recording. We included both head-initial and head-final compounds, in order to test whether the position of the head may influence the reading process. After ruling out the effects of length and frequency, we observed that pseudocompounds (i.e., words with a segment homograph to a real word in the leftmost part) elicited longer total reading times than all other types of complex words, including compounds. Furthermore, head-final compounds elicited longer total reading times than head-initial compounds. The results suggest that a word structure resembling a compound may induce longer processing, presumably related to unexpected morphological structures. The results also converge with previous evidence that in some cases there is a higher processing costs for head-final as opposed to head-initial compounds, possibly indexing a reanalysis of the stimulus in order to correctly assign the constituent properties. However, a deeper analysis restricted to compounds revealed a more complex scenario where several variables interact with headedness (namely, first and second constituent frequency, compound frequency, and compound length), and future studies are needed to discriminate among possible interpretations. Overall, our findings suggest that longer reading times are related to solving incongruities due to noncanonical structures, rather than to morphologically complexity per se.

Detecting spelling errors in compound and pseudocompound words.

“…Although the compound data is consistent with the notion that morphemes are accessed and have facilitatory connections to the whole word, the pseudocompound data suggest that embedded morphemes are accessed (even when they do not function as morphemes in the whole word) and that some form of competition or inhibition occurs when the embedded morphemes in pseudocompounds are accessed. Thus, the pattern of data is relatively consistent with previous suggestions that embedded morphemes are accessed (e.g., Arcara et al, 2014;Gagné & Spalding, 2009;Libben, 1994;Taft & Forster, 1975, 1976Taft & Nillsen, 2013), and perhaps that the impact of retrieving these morphemes is influenced by an obligatory construction process in which the presence of two (or more) unbound morphemes trigger the construction of compound structure (Gagné & Spalding, 2014b, 2014cJi et al, 2011;. Whether the presence of morphemes will help or hinder processing differs for compounds and pseudocompounds because the embedded morphemes match the actual morphological structure for compounds, but mismatch for pseudocompounds.…”

“…However, these models do not consider the impact of the compatibility of the actual morphemic structure of the target. If the recovery of morpho-orthographic representations triggers a composition process then compounds should show a processing advantage relative to control words because morphemic composition would yield a morphological structure that is compatible with the true structure, and also the morphemes would boost activation of the compound, whereas pseudocompounds should not show this advantage because the computed compound structure (triggered by the presence of two free morphemes) would be incompatible with the actual morphemic structure of the pseudocompound (see Arcara et al, 2014; Gagné & Spalding, 2009; Ji et al, 2011; Taft, 2003; Taft & Nillsen, 2013).…”

Mixing positive and negative valence: Affective-semantic integration of bivalent words

“…We expect that LIFG-based semantic integration of novel compounds takes place in other languages too, but if the rules for compounds are more diverse than in German, this may affect their processing. Some languages, like Italian for example, have right and left branching compounds with differences in their lexical processing 37 . In English there is a more diverse compound orthography, with closed compounds (e.g., girlfriend), hyphened compounds (e.g., “credit-rating”), and open compounds (e.g., “tennis racket”), and again lexical processing and semantic integration might be different 38 .…”

The processing of blend words in naming and sentence reading

“…However, despite specific differences across experiments on compound words, a great deal of research in this area supports an early decomposition model for word recognition, in which the component morphemes of a compound word are separately activated during processing (e.g., Andrews, 1986;Arcara, Semenza, & Bambini, 2014;Brooks & Garcia, 2015;Drieghe et al, 2010;Fiorentino & Fund-Reznicek, 2009;Fiorentino, Naito-Billen, Bost, & Fund-Reznicek, 2014;Juhasz et al, 2003;Libben, Gibson, Yoon, & Sandra, 2003;Pollatsek & Hyönä, 2005;Taft & Forster, 1975). For example, Drieghe et al (2010) used a boundary change manipulation to investigate whether constituents of compounds are processed individually or in parallel.…”