The time-course of morphological constraints: evidence from eye-movements during reading.
Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. *rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater vs. mice eater), a contrast that has been ascribed to the semantics of compounds. Measuring eye-movements during reading, this study examined how morphological and semantic information become available over time during the processing of a compound. We found that the morphological constraint affected both early and late eye-movement measures, whereas the semantic constraint for singular non-heads only affected late measures of processing. These results indicate that morphological information becomes available earlier than semantic information during the processing of compounds.
Cunnings
Ian
I
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, C04 3SQ, UK.
Clahsen
Harald
H
D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D012438:Saccades; D012660:Semantics