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. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.