The role of morphological structure in the processing of compounds: the interface between linguistics and psycholinguistics.
This study presents a cross-linguistic investigation of lexical access and subjects' sensitivity to the internal morphological structure of compounds in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Polish. The following questions were addressed: Are individual constituents activated during on-line word recognition? To what extent does internal morphological structure play a role during lexical access? Is there an interaction between headedness and constituent-priming given that the inflection that the second constituent carries determines the gender, number, and case of the compound? Our results show activation of individual constituents of compounds during priming, a strong word effect, and a positional advantage for first constituents in spite of the presence of second constituent heads.
Kehayia
E
E
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Jarema
G
G
Tsapkini
K
K
Perlak
D
D
Ralli
A
A
Kadzielawa
D
D
D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D006115:Greece; D006801:Humans; D011044:Poland; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D014825:Vocabulary