Semantics and Psychology of Complex Words
Edited by Christina L. Gagné and Thomas L. Spalding
Special issue of The Mental Lexicon 15:1 (2020) v, 160 pp.
Christina L. Gagné
List of John Benjamins publications for which Christina L. Gagné plays a role.
Title
Subjects Computational & corpus linguistics | Multilingualism | Neurolinguistics | Psycholinguistics | Semantics
2023 Accessing the semantic and lexical information of constituents while typing compounds The Mental Lexicon 18:2, pp. 265–299 | Article
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… read more
2022 Is meaning construction attempted during the processing of pseudo-compounds? The Mental Lexicon 17:2, pp. 277–299 | Article
Psycholinguists have yet to reach a consensus on what role constituent morphemes play in the processing of compound words, although some recent work suggests that morphemes are activated obligatorily during processing. In the current study, we investigate whether people use morphemes to attempt… read more
2020 Is inhibition involved in the processing of opaque compound words? A study of individual differences The Mental Lexicon 15:2, pp. 258–294 | Article
We examined whether inhibition skills were recruited during the processing of compound words. Using an individual differences perspective, we analyzed whether participants’ scores on the Stroop test predicted performance on lexical decision tasks involving compound words varying in their level of… read more
2020 Introduction to the special issue: Semantics and psychology of complex words Semantics and Psychology of Complex Words, Gagné, Christina L. and Thomas L. Spalding (eds.), pp. 1–3 | Introduction
2020 Property inference from heads to opaque-transparent compounds Semantics and Psychology of Complex Words, Gagné, Christina L. and Thomas L. Spalding (eds.), pp. 123–141 | Article
We investigate how people extend properties from head nouns to compound words. Two conflicting principles seem to be important. Concepts license inference of properties: Knowing that birds fly allows an inference that songbirds fly. On the other hand, a subcategory term like songbirds is created… read more
2014 Relation diversity and ease of processing for opaque and transparent English compounds Morphology and Meaning: Selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2012, Rainer, Franz, Francesco Gardani, Hans Christian Luschützky and Wolfgang U. Dressler (eds.), pp. 153–162 | Article
Emerging evidence suggests that integrating the constituents of compound words involves semantic composition and that this meaning construction process draws on relation information linking the constituents. Research with novel compounds (for which semantic composition is obligatory) has found that… read more
2014 Relational diversity affects ease of processing even for opaque English compounds Semantic Considerations of Lexical Processing, pp. 48–66 | Article
Recent research has indicated that understanding compound words involves an attempt at semantic composition of the constituent words, and that this meaning construction process involves an attempt to identify a relation linking the constituents. Research with novel compounds, where a meaning… read more
2013 Processing of English compounds is sensitive to the constituents’ semantic transparency The Mental Lexicon 8:1, pp. 75–95 | Article
Compounds vary in terms of the extent to which the constituents’ meanings contribute to the meaning of the compound, and there is an ongoing debate about whether the semantic representations of the constituents of opaque compounds are available during compound processing. Three lexical decision… read more
2010 Relational competition during compound interpretation Cross-Disciplinary Issues in Compounding, Scalise, Sergio and Irene Vogel (eds.), pp. 287–300 | Article
The meaning of an endocentric compound (e.g. snowball) is derived not just from its constituents (snow and ball) but also from the relation between them (e.g. noun MADE OF modifier). We propose that, during the interpretation of an endocentric compound, various relational structures compete for… read more
2010 Examining ambiguous adjectives in adjective-noun phrases: Evidence for representation as a shared core-meaning with sense specialization The Mental Lexicon 5:1, pp. 87–114 | Article
The meaning of a modifier is influenced by the noun it modifies (Murphy, 1988). To determine how alternative senses of ambiguous adjectives are represented, we examined the processing of noun phrases. Ambiguous adjectives were paired with nouns such that the interpretation of the phrases used the… read more
2009 Does s now man prime plastic snow? The effect of constituent position in using relational information during the interpretation of modifier-noun phrases The Mental Lexicon 4:1, pp. 41–76 | Article
Three experiments were conducted to determine the extent to which relational and morphosyntactic information influence the processing of modifier-noun phrases. Processing of the target was faster when the shared constituent was in the same position in both the prime and the target, regardless of… read more
2007 The availability of noun properties during the interpretation of novel noun phrases The Mental Lexicon 2:2, pp. 239–258 | Article
The current experiments examine whether recent exposure to a modifier-noun phrase (e.g., unripe peaches) affects the representation of the head noun (e.g, peach). Experiment 1 demonstrates that a property true of the head noun (e.g, sweet) takes longer to verify when preceded by a phrase for which… read more
2007 Lexical and relational influences on the processing of Chinese modifier-noun compounds The Mental Lexicon 2:3, pp. 387–417 | Article
The data from three experiments indicate that recent exposure to a similar Chinese modifier-noun compound (e.g., 书柜, book cabinet or 饼店, cookie store) influences the ease of processing a subsequent compound (e.g., 书店, book store) by increasing the availability of the lexical entries for the… read more
2007 Semantic property activation during the interpretation of combined concepts The Mental Lexicon 2:1, pp. 25–47 | Article
Interpreting a novel conceptual combination often involves selecting and using a relation to link the constituent concepts (e.g., interpreting a plastic pot as a pot made of plastic). In two experiments, we presented the head noun along with a property that, while always at least plausibly true of… read more