The processing of interfixed German compounds

Abstract

This postulate by Goethe (*1749), the first protagonist of a new discipline of morphology (albeit first only within biology), confronts us with the main problem of processing studies of morphology: Are morphological constructions processed as wholes or with regard to their parts or, if both, under which conditions? This question has been of central concern in the psycholinguistic literature on lexical processing over the past quarter century. The debate in this area was initiated by the provocative claim put forward by Taft and Forster (1975; 1976) that multimorphemic words are represented in the mental lexicon in terms of their constituents and that multimorphemic word recognition routinely involves a morphological decomposition procedure. Subsequent experimentation, however, has pointed to the view that neither this strong position nor the strong contrary position advocated by Butterworth (1983) accounts for the performance of language users across languages, task types, and stimulus categories (see McQueen and Cutler (1998) for a recent review). Even within individual categories of morphological construction, experimental results have led to a rather complex view of the role of morphology in lexical processing. Compound word processing, for example, has been shown to provide evidence for both whole word representation and constituent activation. In general, semantically transparent compounds show constituent activation, whereas semantically opaque compounds show greater evidence of whole word activation (Libben 1998; Sandra 1990; Zwitserlood 1994). Recent work by Libben, Derwing and de Almeida (1999) has also suggested that the processing of compounds may involve the creation of multiple representations that are simultaneously computed and evaluated. Libben et al. (1999) claim that the processing of compounds is not guided by a principle of parsing efficiency but rather by a mechanism that uncovers the maximum number of morphemes within a multimorphemic string.

Betrachtung der Gestalt sowohl in ihren Teilen als im Ganzen ...: Morphologie²

(J.W. von Goethe, about 1795)

This research was supported in part by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded to Gonia Jarema (Co-Principal Investigator and Director), Eva Kehayia, (Co-principal Investigator), and Gary Libben, (Co-Principal Investigator) as well as by special funding by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. We also gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Caroline Brew in the testing phase of this research and the contribution of Phaedra Royle in the stimulus development phase as well as in the development of psyscope scripts for this research.