Compound headedness in the mental lexicon: An event-related potential study

Abstract

Compound words in Romance languages may have the head either in the initial or in the final position. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, we address the hypothesis that Italian compounds are processed differently according to their head position and that this is mostly due to the perceived change in the canonical order of syntactic elements. Compound stimuli (head-initial, head-final, or exocentric) were visually displayed in two presentation modes, as whole words or separated into their constituents, in the context of a lexical decision task. Behavioural results showed an increased split cost in head-final and exocentric compounds as compared to head-initial compounds. ERP results showed an enhanced left anterior negativity (LAN) for head-final and exocentric compounds as compared to head-initial compounds, regardless of the presentation mode. Results suggest that the analogy with syntactic order may influence the internal structure of a compound and, as a consequence, its processing, but other characteristics (such as the grammatical properties of constituents) may affect the processing itself.

• Electroencephalogram
• Event-related potential
• Compound words
• Morphology
• Compound headedness.

Notes

1 Within NN1 and NN2 lists, two adjective–noun and two noun–adjective compounds were also included. These stimuli were added in order to have head-final and head-initial conditions as balanced as possible (a similar approach was used in Jarema et al., 1999, and Marelli et al., 2009).

2 The variable TRIAL was included to remove the noise associated with RT changes across the experiment—that is, an increase due to fatigue or a decrease due to familiarization with the experimental settings. The variable was coded as follows: Each trial was associated with the ordinal number indicating its position within the whole experiment (the 1st trial, the 2nd trial, and so on), and this number was included as a covariate.