LaDEP: A large database of English pseudo-compounds

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Pseudo-compounds are words that appear to have a compound structure but lack true morphemic composition.
• Understanding pseudo-compounds is crucial for models of word recognition and morphological processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce the Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP).
• To analyze the psycholinguistic properties of pseudo-compounds.
• To investigate the processing of pseudo-compounds in comparison to true compounds and monomorphemic words.

Main Methods:

• Manual coding of nearly 7500 English pseudo-compounds for morphological features.
• Summarization using psycholinguistic variables like length and frequency.
• Lexical decision task comparing response times for compound, pseudo-compound, and monomorphemic words.

Main Results:

• Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words showed similar lexical decision response times.
• Both pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words were processed slower than true compound words.
• This indicates that the apparent morphemic structure of pseudo-compounds does not facilitate lexical access.

Conclusions:

• The LaDEP provides a valuable resource for studying word structure and processing.
• Pseudo-compounds do not offer the same processing advantage as true compounds.
• Further research can utilize LaDEP to explore morphological decomposition, lexical access, and language impairments.