Article published in:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 13:2 (2018) ► pp. 269–284
Methodological and analytic considerations

What does constituent priming mean in the investigation of compound processing?

| Brock University
| City University of New York
| University of Tübingen
Most dictionary definitions for the term compound word characterize it as a word that itself contains two or more words. Thus, a compound word such as goldfish is composed of the constituent words gold and fish. In this report, we present evidence that compound words such as goldfish might not contain the words gold and fish, but rather positionally bound compound constituents (e.g., gold- and -fish) that are distinct and often in competition with their whole word counterparts. This conceptualization has significant methodological consequences: it calls into question the assumption that, in a traditional visual constituent priming paradigm, the participant can be said to be presented with constituents as primes. We claim that they are not presented with constituents. Rather, they are presented with competing free-standing words. We present evidence for the processing of Hebrew compound words that supports this perspective by revealing that, counter-intuitively, prime constituent frequency has an attenuating effect on constituent priming. We relate our findings to previous findings in the study of German compound processing to show that the effect that we report is fundamentally morphological rather than positional or visual in nature. In contrast to German in which compounds are always head-final morphologically, Hebrew compounds are always head initial. In addition, whereas German compounds are written as single words, Hebrew compounds are always written with spaces between constituents. Thus, the commonality of patterning across German and Hebrew is independent of visual form and constituent ordering, revealing, as we claim, core features of the constituent priming paradigm and compound processing.
Keywords: Hebrew, morphology, constituent priming, compounds, frequency, lexical decision
Article outline
  • What does constituent priming mean in the investigation of compound processing?
    • The prominence of compound words in the lexical processing literature
    • Compound words and the constituent priming paradigm
    • Re-evaluating the constituent priming paradigm
    • Hebrew as an ideal test case for constituent-compound competition
  • An investigation of frequency effects associate with Hebrew compound constituents as whole words
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Stimuli
      • Procedure
    • Results
      • Control variables
      • Compound frequency and priming condition effects
      • Constituent frequency effects
  • Discussion
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00001.lib
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