Abstract
We sought to move beyond single word and sentence processing experiments in order to examine textual effects on the processing of compound words in English. We developed minimal texts (sentences pairs that together constitute a story) that had neutral, semantic or lexical relations between the last word of the first sentence and the second word of the second sentence (which was always a compound noun). This generated minimal text triplets that differed only in the last word of the first sentence (e.g., “She walked down to the path/river/water. The waterfall roared in the distance”). Four experiments were conducted with a total 143 native speakers of English. Experiment 1 employed a Modified Maze Task to identify cross-sentence effects on compound processing. Sentence pairs with lexical links differed from those with semantic links, which, in turn differed from neutral pairs, providing evidence of cross-sentence influence on compound processing. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, we examined compound production using typing tasks. Results indicated that morphological effects found in single word typing persisted in text typing. In addition, constituent priming effects on typing were seen in both single word typing and sentence typing. Finally, morphological effects were correlated with overall story ratings. We thus conclude that morphological effects are not restricted to single word processing, but rather reflect the dynamics of real-world language processing.
Highlights
A key challenge in the design of psycholinguistic research on lexical processing is to create experiments that have ecological validity and at the same time are sufficiently controlled so that specific variables and hypotheses regarding their effects can be examined
These experiments are designed to address the following questions: Question (a): Are priming effects found in the processing of individual compound words evident when the compound is part of a text and the putative prime is an antecedent word within that text?
Question (c): Are the elevated keystroke latencies found at the morphological boundary in the typing of single compound words evident when the compound is part of a text?
Summary
A key challenge in the design of psycholinguistic research on lexical processing is to create experiments that have ecological validity and at the same time are sufficiently controlled so that specific variables and hypotheses regarding their effects can be examined. We report on a series of experiments that have been designed to enhance ecological validity in the investigation of lexical processing by examining the processing of compound words within written texts. These texts have been constructed to more closely approximate naturally occurring language and at the same time be sufficiently controlled in their structure so that we can capture the interplay of factors in morphological processing. An example of such a story is provided in 1) below: Textual Effects in Compound Processing
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