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Updated: Jan 9, 2026
06:48
Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
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Early access effects in English compound and pseudo-compound words
Thomas L Spalding1, Christina L Gagné2, Alexander Taikh3
1Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E9, Canada. spalding@ualberta.ca.
Memory & Cognition
|December 1, 2025
Summary
Compound word processing benefits from semantic transparency, with advantages appearing later in processing. This effect is influenced by prime duration and semantic matching, unlike opaque compounds or pseudo-compounds.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Morphemic constituents of compound words are activated during word access.
- The precise impact of these constituents on word access remains unclear.
- Understanding compound word processing is crucial for theories of language comprehension.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of compound word morphology in word access.
- To determine how semantic transparency influences the processing of compound words.
- To examine the temporal dynamics of constituent activation in compound word recognition.
Main Methods:
- Employed a masked repetition primed lexical decision task across several experiments.
- Compared semantically transparent compounds, opaque compounds, and pseudo-compounds against controls.
- Manipulated prime durations (50, 100, and 300 ms) to assess temporal effects.
Main Results:
- Semantically transparent compounds showed processing advantages over controls.
- Opaque compounds and pseudo-compounds did not exhibit this advantage and showed less priming at longer durations.
- Compound advantages emerged at longer prime durations (300 ms) and were sensitive to semantic and morphological matching.
Conclusions:
- The processing advantage for compound words is linked to semantic transparency and appears late in the processing stream.
- This advantage is modulated by prime duration, suggesting a dynamic interaction between constituent and whole-word processing.
- The findings support models where late-stage semantic and morphological integration influences compound word recognition.
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