Constituent processing in compound and pseudocompound words

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Theories of multimorphemic word recognition suggest constituent representations are key.
• Previous research indicates pseudoconstituents and constituents activate during masked priming.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether readers access semantic information of pseudoconstituents and constituents.
• To differentiate between morphological and semantic activation in masked priming.

Main Methods:

• Four experiments using masked priming with pseudocompounds and compounds.
• Lexical decision tasks measuring response times to semantic associates.

Main Results:

• Masked primes did not influence lexical decisions on semantic associates of pseudoconstituents.
• Associates of the first constituent facilitated compound processing but not pseudocompound processing.
• Findings suggest morphological, not semantic, activation dominates masked priming.

Conclusions:

• Masked priming primarily activates the morphological form of word constituents.
• Semantic information of constituents is less accessible under masked priming conditions.
• This challenges theories relying solely on semantic activation for multimorphemic word recognition.