The role of hyponymy and context concreteness in compound word processing

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper describes the effects of hyponymy and emotion on the comprehension and production of compound words. The research subjects are over 2000 concatenated compounds of English taken from the LADEC database (Gagné et al. 2019). The study builds on the research carried out in Charitonidis (2022), according to which context concreteness for the second constituent was a significant positive predictor of lexical decision and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and the British Lexicon Project (BLP). In the present paper, the hyponymy norms from Gagné et al. (2020) were added in the analysis. The results show that both hyponymy and context concreteness for the second constituent are relevant. In addition, all models including both variables have a better fit than nested models omitting one of these variables. There is thus strong evidence that both hyponymy and context concreteness for the second constituent are obligatory parameters in compound word processing.