THE ROLE OF ANALOGY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF NOVEL COMPOUNDS

It was investigated whether the on-line interpretative processing of n ovel nominal compounds is affected by analogous lexicalized compounds. In Experiment 1, novel compounds were presented as nonwords in a lexi cal decision task. Constituent nouns of novel compounds were of high o r low productivity as measured by the number of lexicalized compounds of which they were part. Effects of productivity and of compound inter pretability on decision latencies were found to be additive, suggestin g that the activated lexicalized compounds do not contribute to the in terpretation of novel compounds. In Experiment 2, a semantic priming p aradigm was used in a lexical decision task. Lexicalized compounds wer e presented as targets and novel compounds as primes. Second nouns of lexicalized and novel compounds were identical and first nouns of the two types of compounds were semantically related. Target compounds dif fered in frequency. Equal priming effects were obtained for high- and low-frequency target compounds, indicating that novel compounds do not activate more strongly the most similar lexicalized compound. The rol e of analogous interpretative processing is considered in the context of alternative models for the interpretation of novel compounds.