Head-driven gender assignment in noun-noun compound recognition: Evidence from a determiner priming task in German

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Understanding how the human brain processes complex words, such as noun-noun compounds, is crucial for psycholinguistics.
• The grammatical gender of individual word components may or may not be activated during compound word recognition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether embedded constituents within noun-noun compounds activate their grammatical gender independently.
• To determine if grammatical gender processing during compound word recognition is head-driven or constituent-specific.

Main Methods:

• A visual lexical decision task using German noun-noun compounds (e.g., Wasserflasche).
• Determiner primes (der, die, das) were used, congruent with the head, modifier, or incongruent with both.
• Two online experiments with varied prime durations were conducted to measure reaction times and accuracy.

Main Results:

• Head-congruent determiner primes significantly speeded compound recognition in both experiments.
• No significant effects were observed for modifier-congruent primes, suggesting the modifier's gender is not activated.
• Constituent-specific effects were found in response accuracies in Experiment 2, linked to semantic transparency.

Conclusions:

• The findings support a head-driven gender assignment mechanism in noun-noun compound recognition.
• Grammatical gender activation appears to be primarily associated with the head constituent of the compound.
• The modifier's grammatical gender does not seem to be activated during the lexical decision task.