Abstract
This study examines the lexical representation and processing of noun-noun compounds and their grammatical gender during speech production in German, a language that codes for grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Using a picture-word interference paradigm, participants produced determiner-compound noun phrases in response to pictures, while ignoring written distractor words. Compound targets were either semantically transparent (e.g., birdhouse) or opaque (e.g., hotdog), and their constituent nouns either had the same or a different gender (internal gender match). Effects of gender-congruent but otherwise unrelated distractor nouns, and of two morphologically related distractors corresponding to the first or second constituent were assessed relative to a completely unrelated, gender-incongruent distractor baseline. Both constituent distractors strongly facilitated compound naming, and these effects were independent of the targets' semantic transparency. This supports retrieval of constituent morphemes for semantically transparent and opaque compounds during speech production. Furthermore, gender congruency between compounds and distractors did not speed up naming in general, but interacted with gender match of the compounds' constituent nouns, and their semantic transparency. A significant gender-congruency effect was obtained with semantically transparent compounds, consisting of two constituent nouns of the same gender, only. In principle, this pattern is compatible with a multiple lemma representation account for semantically transparent, but not for opaque compounds. The data also fit with a more parsimonious, holistic representation for all compounds at the lemma level, when differences in co-activation patterns for semantically transparent and opaque compounds are considered.
Highlights
It is still a matter of debate whether the morphological structure of polymorphemic words, such as compounds, determines their lexical representation and processing, and if so, how
Our study examines the lexical representation and processes involved in the production of determiner-compound noun phrases, using a picture-word interference paradigm
Noun-noun compound targets varied in semantic transparency and gender match, that is, half of the compounds was semantically transparent and the other half was opaque, and in half of the compounds within each transparency group, the compounds’ constituents had the same grammatical gender, while in the other half the constituent nouns differed in gender
Summary
It is still a matter of debate whether the morphological structure of polymorphemic words, such as compounds (e.g., sunflower), determines their lexical representation and processing, and if so, how. Dual- or multiple-route accounts assume that the type of processing depends on different characteristics of complex words, such as their frequency or semantic transparency (e.g., Zwitserlood, 1994; Schreuder and Baayen, 1995; Kuperman et al, 2009; Marelli and Luzzatti, 2012; Xu and Taft, 2015). Dual-route accounts assume morpheme-based processing for semantically transparent complex words (e.g., birdhouse), but (more) holistic processing for opaque words (e.g., hotdog). Most data that test such predictions come from comprehension studies, or from studies on the interface between comprehension and production, presenting complex words as distractors to pictures with monomorphemic names (e.g., Zwitserlood et al, 2002; Köster and Schiller, 2008; Lüttmann et al, 2011b; Verdonschot et al, 2012). Studies on the actual production of complex words are quite rare (e.g., Roelofs and Baayen, 2002; Lüttmann et al, 2011a; Jacobs and Dell, 2014)
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