Influence of the constituent morpheme boundary on compound word access.

Embedded morphemes are thought to become available during the processing of multi-morphemic words, and impact access to the whole word. According to the edge-aligned embedded word activation theory Grainger & Beyersmann, (2017), embedded morphemes receive activation when the whole word can be decomposed into constituent morphemes. Thus, interfering with morphological decomposition also interferes with access to the embedded morphemes. Numerous studies have examined the effects of interfering with boundary and constituent-internal letters on morphological decomposition by comparing the effect of transposing letters at the morphemic boundary to constituent-internal letters. These studies, which report inconsistent findings, have typically used derived multi-morphemic words (e.g., cleaner), and sometimes use a control replacement letter condition that is not matched to the transposed letter conditions in terms of location. Across five experiments, we test the edge-aligned activation theory by examining the effects of replacing and transposing boundary and constituent-internal letters of compounds. Our findings suggest that replacing boundary letters interferes with access to both embedded constituents, while replacing constituent-internal letters still allows for access to the unaltered constituent, thus compensating for the interference in the altered constituent. Our findings are consistent with the edge-aligned theory with respect to letter replacement, and also imply that letter replacement must match the position of letter transposition when it is used as a control condition.

LaDEP: A large database of English pseudo-compounds.

The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which mimic, but do not truly possess, a compound morphemic structure. These pseudo-compounds can be parsed into two free morpheme constituents (e.g., car-pet), but neither constituent functions as a morpheme within the overall word structure. The items were manually coded as pseudo-compounds, further coded for features related to their morphological structure (e.g., presence of multiple affixes, as in ruler-ship), and summarized using common psycholinguistic variables (e.g., length, frequency). This paper also presents an example analysis comparing the lexical decision response times between compound words, pseudo-compound words, and monomorphemic words. Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words did not differ in response time, and both groups had slower response times than compound words. This analysis replicates the facilitatory effect of compound constituents during lexical processing, and demonstrates the need to emphasize the pseudo-constituent structure of pseudo-compounds to parse their effects. Further applications of LaDEP include both psycholinguistic studies investigating the nature of human word processing or production and educational or clinical settings evaluating the impact of linguistic features on language learning and impairments. Overall, the items within LaDEP provide a varied and representative sample of the population of English pseudo-compounds which may be used to facilitate further research related to morphological decomposition, lexical access, meaning construction, orthographical influences, and much more.

Effects of Lexical Properties in L2 Chinese Compound Processing: A Multivariate Approach.

Previous studies on L2 (i.e., second language) Chinese compound processing have focused on the relative efficiency of two routes: holistic processing versus combinatorial processing. However, it is still unclear whether Chinese compounds are processed with multilevel representations among L2 learners due to the hierarchical structure of the characters. Therefore, taking a multivariate approach, the present study evaluated the relative influence and importance of different grain sizes of lexical information in an L2 Chinese two-character compound decision task. Results of supervised component generalized linear regression models with random forests analysis revealed that the orthographic, phonological and semantic information all contributed to L2 compound processing, but the L2 learners used more orthographic processing strategies and fewer phonological processing strategies compared to the native speakers. Specifically, the orthographic information was activated at the whole-word, the character and the radical levels in orthographic processing, and the phonological information at the whole-word, the syllable, and the phoneme levels all exerted contributions in phonological processing. Furthermore, the semantic information of the whole words and the constituents was accessed in semantic processing. These findings together suggest that the L2 learners are able to use cues at all levels simultaneously to process Chinese compound words, supporting a multi-route model with a hierarchical morphological structure in such processing.

Use of connecting vowels after stems ending in the same vowel: a proposal to emend Appendix 9 of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes.

The International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP) provides guidance on the formation of names from compound words. This includes recommendations on the use of connecting vowels, which are meant to make names easier to pronounce. However, deployment of a connecting vowel when the preceding word element ends in the same vowel can make a name harder to spell or say, bringing us into conflict with the recommendations that we should avoid names that are disagreeable and difficult to pronounce. Given that there are many precedents where connecting vowels are not used in this context, particularly in names formed from the term 'alkali', I hereby propose an emendation to the ICNP to drop the connecting vowel when the preceding word element ends in the same vowel.

Patterns in CAOSS: Distributed representations predict variation in relational interpretations for familiar and novel compound words.

While distributional semantic models that represent word meanings as high-dimensional vectors induced from large text corpora have been shown to successfully predict human behavior across a wide range of tasks, they have also received criticism from different directions. These include concerns over their interpretability (how can numbers specifying abstract, latent dimensions represent meaning?) and their ability to capture variation in meaning (how can a single vector representation capture multiple different interpretations for the same expression?). Here, we demonstrate that semantic vectors can indeed rise up to these challenges, by training a mapping system (a simple linear regression) that predicts inter-individual variation in relational interpretations for compounds such as wood brush (for example brush FOR wood, or brush MADE OF wood) from (compositional) semantic vectors representing the meanings of these compounds. These predictions consistently beat different random baselines, both for familiar compounds (moon light, Experiment 1) as well as novel compounds (wood brush, Experiment 2), demonstrating that distributional semantic vectors encode variations in qualitative interpretations that can be decoded using techniques as simple as linear regression.

Psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words.

Compounds are morphologically complex words made of different linguistic parts. They are very prevalent in a number of languages such as French. Different psycholinguistic characteristics of compounds have been used in certain studies to investigate the mechanisms involved in compound processing (see Table 7). We provide psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words. The words were normed on seven characteristics: lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, sensory experience, conceptual familiarity, imageability, age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency. Reliability measures were computed for the collected norms. Descriptive statistical analyses, and correlational and multiple regression analyses were performed. We also report some comparisons made between our normative data and certain norms obtained in other similar studies. The entire set of norms, which will be very useful to researchers investigating the processing of compounds, is available as Supplemental Material.

The more you know: Schema-congruency supports associative encoding of novel compound words. Evidence from event-related potentials.

We aimed to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms of event congruency with prior (schema) knowledge for the learning of novel compound words. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during an incidental learning task, in which novel noun-noun compounds were presented in a semantically congruent context, enabling schema-supported processing, or in a neutral context. As expected, associative memory performance was better for compounds preceded by a congruent context. Although the N400 was attenuated in the congruent condition, subsequent memory effects (SMEs) in the N400 time interval did not differ across conditions, suggesting that the processes reflected in the N400 cannot account for the memory advantage in the congruent condition. However, a parietal SME was obtained for compounds preceded by a congruent context, only, which we interpret as reflecting the schema-supported formation of a conceptual compound representation. A late frontal SME was obtained in both conditions, presumably reflecting the more general inter-item associative encoding of compound constituents.

CompLex: an eye-movement database of compound word reading in English.

The CompLex database presents a large-scale collection of eye-movement studies on English compound-word processing. A combined total of 440 participants completed eye-tracking experiments in which they silently read unspaced English compound words (e.g., goalpost) embedded in sentence contexts (e.g., Dylan hit the goalpost when he was aiming for the net.). Three studies were conducted using participants representing the non-college-bound population (300 participants), and four studies included participants recruited from the student population (140 participants). The database comprises trial-level eye-movement data (47,763 trials), participant data (including a measure of reading experience estimated via the Author Recognition Test), and lexical characteristics for the set of 931 English compound words used as critical stimuli in the studies. One contribution of the present paper is a set of regression analyses conducted on the full database and individual experiments. We report that the most reliable and consistent main effects were those elicited by compound word length, left constituent frequency, right constituent frequency, compound frequency and semantic transparency. Separately, we also found that the effect of left frequency and compound word length is weaker among more frequent compounds. Another contribution is a power analysis, in which we determined the sample sizes required to reliably detect effect sizes that are comparable to those observed in our regression models. These sample size estimates serve as a recommendation for researchers wishing to either collect eye-movement data for compound word reading, or use the current database as a resource for the study of English compound word processing.

Two words as one: A multi-naming investigation of the age-of-acquisition effect in compound-word processing.

Previous research has shown that early-acquired words are produced faster than late-acquired words. Juhasz and colleagues (Juhasz, Lai & Woodcock, Behavior Research Methods, 47 (4), 1004-1019, 2015; Juhasz, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-10, 2018) argue that the Age-of-Acquisition (AoA) loci for complex words, specifically compound words, are found at the lexical/semantic level. In the current study, two experiments were conducted to evaluate this claim and investigate the influence of AoA in reading compound words aloud. In Experiment 1, 48 participants completed a word naming task. Using general linear mixed modelling, we found that the age at which the compound word was learned significantly affected the naming latencies beyond the other psycholinguistic properties measured. The second experiment required 48 participants to name the compound word when the two morphemes were presented with a space in-between (combinatorial naming, e.g. air plane). We found that the age at which the compound word was learned, as well as the AoA of the individual morphemes that formed the compound word, significantly influenced combinatorial naming latency. These findings are discussed in relation to theories of the AoA in language processing.

Semantic transparency effects in German compounds: A large dataset and multiple-task investigation.

In the present study, we provide a comprehensive analysis and a multi-dimensional dataset of semantic transparency measures for 1810 German compound words. Compound words are considered semantically transparent when the contribution of the constituents' meaning to the compound meaning is clear (as in airport), but the degree of semantic transparency varies between compounds (compare strawberry or sandman). Our dataset includes both compositional and relatedness-based semantic transparency measures, also differentiated by constituents. The measures are obtained from a computational and fully implemented semantic model based on distributional semantics. We validate the measures using data from four behavioral experiments: Explicit transparency ratings, two different lexical decision tasks using different nonwords, and an eye-tracking study. We demonstrate that different semantic effects emerge in different behavioral tasks, which can only be captured using a multi-dimensional approach to semantic transparency. We further provide the semantic transparency measures derived from the model for a dataset of 40,475 additional German compounds, as well as for 2061 novel German compounds.

Inter-character Orthographic Similarity Effects on the Recognition of Chinese Coordinative Compound Words.

Chinese coordinative compound words are common and unique in inter-character semantic and orthographic relationships. This study explored the inter-character orthographic similarity effects on the recognition of transparent two-morpheme coordinative compound words. Seventy-two native Chinese readers participated in a lexical decision task. The findings demonstrated robust inhibitory inter-character orthographic similarity effects, intra-word character reversal effects, and inter-character semantic similarity effects. These results were compared to those of previous studies on coordinative compound word recognition and on the orthographic similarity phenomenon at both character and word levels. The findings were explained with the multi-level representational model of morphological processing of Chinese compound words (Zhou and Marslen-Wilson in Psychologia 43:47-66, 2000). The model was further extended by adding the activation of morpho-orthographic relationships and the mapping of morphemic orthographic information onto the semantic information of both morphemes and whole words.

Constituent frequency effects in the written production of Spanish compound words.

The debate about whether compound words are accessed as whole words or via their constituents remains unresolved, especially in the field of language production. In this study, three experiments used a copying task to examine whether compound words are accessed via their constituents in handwriting production. In Experiment 1, production of compound words and noncompounds was compared. The last interletter interval within the first constituent of compounds was observed to be shorter than the same interval in noncompounds, revealing that writing durations are sensitive to morphological processing. In Experiments 2 and 3, the first and second constituent frequency was manipulated respectively. The frequency of both constituents affected writing onset times. Interestingly, the interval between the last two letters of the first constituent was shorter when the second constituent was of high frequency, suggesting that the effect obtained in this position in Experiment 1 was related to the anticipation of the second constituent. Our findings indicate that both constituents are activated before the initiation of the written response and that the second component is reactivated before the production of the first constituent has finished.

LADEC: The Large Database of English Compounds.

The Large Database of English Compounds (LADEC) consists of over 8,000 English words that can be parsed into two constituents that are free morphemes, making it the largest existing database specifically for use in research on compound words. Both monomorphemic (e.g., wheel) and multimorphemic (e.g., teacher) constituents were used. The items were selected from a range of sources, including CELEX, the English Lexicon Project, the British Lexicon Project, the British National Corpus, and Wordnet, and were hand-coded as compounds (e.g., snowball). Participants rated each compound in terms of how predictable its meaning is from its parts, as well as the extent to which each constituent retains its meaning in the compound. In addition, we obtained linguistic characteristics that might influence compound processing (e.g., frequency, family size, and bigram frequency). To show the usefulness of the database in investigating compound processing, we conducted a number of analyses that showed that compound processing is consistently affected by semantic transparency, as well as by many of the other variables included in LADEC. We also showed that the effects of the variables associated with the two constituents are not symmetric. In short, LADEC provides the opportunity for researchers to investigate a number of questions about compounds that have not been possible to investigate in the past, due to the lack of sufficiently large and robust datasets. In addition to directly allowing researchers to test hypotheses using the information included in LADEC, the database will contribute to future compound research by allowing better stimulus selection and matching.

Computational Models of the Representation of Bangla Compound Words in the Mental Lexicon.

In this paper we aim to model the organization and processing of Bangla compound words in the mental lexicon. Our objective is to determine whether the mental lexicon access a Bangla compound word as a whole or decomposes the whole word into its constituent morphemes and then recognize them accordingly. To address this issue, we adopted two different strategies. First, we conduct a cross-modal priming experiment over a number of native speakers. Analysis of reaction time (RT) and error rates indicates that in general, Bangla compound words are accessed via partial decomposition process. That is some word follows full-listing mode of representation and some words follow the decomposition route of representation. Next, based on the collected RT data we have developed a computational model that can explain the processing phenomena of the access and representation of Bangla compound words. In order to achieve this, we first explored the individual roles of head word position, morphological complexity, orthographic transparency and semantic compositionality between the constituents and the whole compound word. Accordingly, we have developed a complexity based model by combining these features together. To a large extent we have successfully explained the possible processing phenomena of most of the Bangla compound words. Our proposed model shows an accuracy of around 83 %.

Compound headedness in the mental lexicon: an event-related potential study.

Compound words in Romance languages may have the head either in the initial or in the final position. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, we address the hypothesis that Italian compounds are processed differently according to their head position and that this is mostly due to the perceived change in the canonical order of syntactic elements. Compound stimuli (head-initial, head-final, or exocentric) were visually displayed in two presentation modes, as whole words or separated into their constituents, in the context of a lexical decision task. Behavioural results showed an increased split cost in head-final and exocentric compounds as compared to head-initial compounds. ERP results showed an enhanced left anterior negativity (LAN) for head-final and exocentric compounds as compared to head-initial compounds, regardless of the presentation mode. Results suggest that the analogy with syntactic order may influence the internal structure of a compound and, as a consequence, its processing, but other characteristics (such as the grammatical properties of constituents) may affect the processing itself.

Word structure and decomposition effects in reading.

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.

Electrophysiological evidence for the morpheme-based combinatoric processing of English compounds.

The extent to which the processing of compounds (e.g., "catfish") makes recourse to morphological-level representations remains a matter of debate. Moreover, positing a morpheme-level route to complex word recognition entails not only access to morphological constituents, but also combinatoric processes operating on the constituent representations; however, the neurophysiological mechanisms subserving decomposition, and in particular morpheme combination, have yet to be fully elucidated. The current study presents electrophysiological evidence for the morpheme-based processing of both lexicalized (e.g., "teacup") and novel (e.g., "tombnote") visually presented English compounds; these brain responses appear prior to and are dissociable from the eventual overt lexical decision response. The electrophysiological results reveal increased negativities for conditions with compound structure, including effects shared by lexicalized and novel compounds, as well as effects unique to each compound type, which may be related to aspects of morpheme combination. These findings support models positing across-the-board morphological decomposition, counter to models proposing that putatively complex words are primarily or solely processed as undecomposed representations, and motivate further electrophysiological research toward a more precise characterization of the nature and neurophysiological instantiation of complex word recognition.

The representation of compound headedness in the mental lexicon: a picture naming study in aphasia.

Most compound words are constituted of a head constituent (e.g., light in moonlight) and a modifier constituent (e.g., moon in moonlight); the information transmitted by these head-modifier roles is fundamental for defining the grammatical and semantic properties of the compound and for identifying a correct combination of the constituents at the conceptual level. The objective of this study is to assess how lexical processing in aphasia is influenced by the head-modifier structure of nominal compounds. A picture-naming task of 35 compounds with head-initial (pescespada, swordfish, literally fishsword) and head-final (autostrada, highway, literally carroad) forms was administered to 45 Italian aphasic patients, and their accuracy in retrieving constituents was analysed with a mixed-effects logistic regression. The interaction between headedness and constituent position was significant: The modifier emerged as being more difficult to retrieve than the head, but only for head-final compounds. The results are consistent with previous data from priming experiments on healthy subjects and provide convincing evidence that compound headedness is represented at central processing levels.

Age of acquisition effects in Chinese two-character compound words: a megastudy of eye movements during reading.

Words learned earlier in life are processed faster than words learned later in life. In Chinese, the age of acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively studied in one-character words, yet no studies have explored this effect in compound words. Given that compound words are a widespread word type and are processed differently than one-character words, it is unclear how AoA affects compound word processing. The present study examined the role of multiple variables in the processing of Chinese two-character compound words based on a database of eye-movement measures. We focused on the AoA effect from the whole compound word and the first and second characters. We found that whole-word AoA and first-character AoA have an early and long-lasting influence, with no AoA effect from the second character. The results indicated that two-character compound words are accessed via the character and whole word simultaneously. These findings are discussed with respect to theories of the AoA effect.

Schema-congruency supports the formation of unitized representations: Evidence from event-related potentials.

The main goal of the present study was to investigate whether schema-based encoding of novel word pairs (i.e., novel compound words) supports the formation of unitized representations and thus, associative familiarity-based recognition. We report two experiments that both comprise an incidental learning task, in which novel noun-noun compound words were presented in semantically congruent contexts, enabling schema-supported processing of both constituents, contrasted with a schema-neutral condition. In Experiment 1, the effects of schema congruency on memory performance were larger for associative memory performance than for item memory performance in a memory test in which intact, recombined, and new compound words had to be discriminated. This supports the view that schema congruency boosts associative memory by promoting unitization. When contrasting event-related potentials (ERPs) for hits with correct rejections or associative misses, an N400 attenuation effect (520-676 ms) indicating absolute familiarity was present in the congruent condition, but not in the neutral condition. In line with this, a direct comparison of ERPs on hits across conditions revealed more positive waveforms in the congruent than in the neutral condition. This suggests that absolute familiarity contributes to associative recognition memory when schema-supported processing is established. In Experiment 2, we tested whether schema congruency enables the formation of semantically overlapping representations. Therefore, we included semantically similar lure compound words in the test phase and compared false alarm rates to these lures across conditions. In line with our hypothesis, we found higher false alarm rates in the congruent as compared to the neutral condition. In conclusion, we provide converging evidence for the view that schema congruency enables the formation of unitized representations and supports familiarity-based memory retrieval.