Bilingual reading of compound words
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Updated: Jun 11, 2026
Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task
Published on: February 26, 2020
In Yeong Ko1, Min Wang, Say Young Kim
1Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, 3304C Benjamin Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Abstract:
The present study investigated whether bilingual readers activate constituents of compound words in one language while processing compound words in the other language via decomposition. Two experiments using a lexical decision task were conducted with adult Korean-English bilingual readers. In Experiment 1, the lexical decision of real English compound words was more accurate when the translated compounds (the combination of the translation equivalents of the constituents) in Korean (the nontarget language) were real words than when they were nonwords. In Experiment 2, when the frequency of the second constituents of compound words in English (the target language) was manipulated, the effect of lexical status of the translated compounds was greater on the compounds with high-frequency second constituents than on those with low-frequency second constituents in the target language. Together, these results provided evidence for morphological decomposition and cross-language activation in bilingual reading of compound words.
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