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, Creek and Polish. The following question s were addressed: Are individual constituents activated during on-line word recognition? To what extent does internal morphological structure play a r ole during lexical access? Is there an interaction between headedness and c onstituent-priming given that the inflection that the second constituent ca rries determines the gender, number, and case of the compound? Our results show activation of individual constituents of compounds during priming, a s trong word effect, and a positional advantage for first constituents in spi te of the presence of second constituent heads. (C) 1999 Academic Press.