Accessing the semantic and lexical information of constituents while typing compounds

A key question in research concerning the typing production of morphologically complex words is whether the whole multimorphemic word is output ballistically or whether individual constituents are accessed during typing. To address this question, we examined keystroke latencies during the production of English compounds (e.g., snowball) to test whether the initiation and continued typing of each constituent (e.g., snow and ball) are influenced by its linguistic properties (length, frequency, and semantic transparency). Participants identified and then typed a compound word. We found that the initiation and continued typing of each constituent was influenced by the linguistic properties of that constituent. However, the linguistic properties of the second constituent also influenced the typing latency of the final letter of the first constituent, suggesting that production of the first constituent overlapped with accessing and planning the keystrokes of the second constituent. The influence of the linguistic properties of the first constituent on its own initiation and continued typing suggests that accessing and planning the keystrokes of the first constituent occurred as the compound word was being identified. Our findings indicate that individual constituents are accessed during production and influence the typing of compound words.