Effects of morphological families on English compound word recognition: A multitask investigation

Abstract

Three experiments examined the influence of first lexeme morphological family size on English compound word recognition. Concatenated compound words whose first lexemes were from large morphological families were responded to faster in word naming and lexical decision than compounds from small morphological families. In addition, an eye movement experiment showed that gaze durations were shorter on compounds from large morphological families during sentence reading. This was mainly due to more refixations on compounds from small morphological families. Posthoc analyses and re-analysis of past studies suggested that compounds with a larger number of higher frequency family members (HFFM) are read more slowly than compounds with fewer HFFM. Thus, while morphological family size is generally facilitative, the presence of HFFM has an inhibitory effect on eye movement behaviour. The time-course of these effects is discussed.