We report on a psycholinguistic study of semantic transparency among English compound words. We employed the P3 technique (Libben et al. 2012), which combines elements of three experimental paradigms: progressive demasking, naming, and word typing. Both the progressive demasking data and the word typing data showed a graded effect of semantic transparency associated with the number and location of semantically opaque constituents in the compound. Typing duration effects were evident at the constituent boundary, supporting observations first made by Sahel et al. (2008). We suggest that these data point to the value of letter typing durations in the analysis of morphological processing and the importance of a psychocentric perspective on lexical processing – one that emphasizes the psychological nature of morphological structures.
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Cited by (13)
Cited by 13 other publications
Yousefzadeh, Bahareh, Gary Libben & Sidney J. Segalowitz
2024. Persian compounds in the mental lexicon. Frontiers in Communication 9
Breadmore, Helen L., Emily Côté & S. Hélène Deacon
2023. The Timing Tells the Tale: Multiple Morphological Processes in Children’s and Adults’ Spelling. Scientific Studies of Reading 27:5 ► pp. 408 ff.
Gallant, Jordan
2023. ,
Kačmár, Pavol & Lívia Körtvélyessy
2023. Big-Five model of personality and word formation: role of open-mindedness in semantic transparency and economy of expression. Language and Cognition 15:2 ► pp. 217 ff.
Taikh, Alexander, Christina Gagné & Thomas Spalding
2022. Urban village on a global scale: Diverse interpretations of one label. Urban Geography 43:2 ► pp. 184 ff.
Yao, Yijia
2022. Exploring the Processing of Japanese Compound Verbs: Evidence from Unmasked Priming Lexical Decision Task. International Journal of Asian Language Processing 32:01
Libben, Gary, Jordan Gallant & Wolfgang U. Dressler
2021. Textual Effects in Compound Processing: A Window on Words in the World. Frontiers in Communication 6
2018. The Morphosemantic Transparency/Opacity of Novel English Analogical Compounds and Compound Families. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 53:1 ► pp. 67 ff.
Gagné, Christina L. & Thomas L. Spalding
2016. Written production of English compounds: effects of morphology and semantic transparency. Morphology 26:2 ► pp. 133 ff.
Libben, Gary, Kaitlin Curtiss & Silke Weber
2014. Psychocentricity and participant profiles: implications for lexical processing among multilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology 5
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