Is Milkman a superhero like Batman? Constituent morphological priming in compound words

Abstract

In the present study, we examined morphological decomposition of Basque compound words in a series of masked priming lexical decision experiments. In Experiment 1, Basque compound words could be briefly preceded by other compounds that shared either the first or second constituent, or by unrelated noncompound words. Results showed a significant priming effect for words that shared a constituent, independently of its position. In Experiment 2, compound words were preceded by other compound words that shared one of their constituents, but in a different lexeme position (e.g., the first constituent of the compound that acted as a prime was the second constituent of the compound that acted as a target). Results again showed a constituent priming effect (i.e., location in the string is not necessary for priming to occur). In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that these priming effects were not due to mere form overlap: pairs of noncompound words that shared either the beginning or the ending chunk did not produce a priming effect. Taken together, the present results converge with previous data on orthographic/morphological priming and provide evidence favouring early morphological decomposition.

Keywords:

• Compound words
• Morphological priming
• Morphological decomposition

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper has been partially supported by Grants SEJ2004-07680-C02-02/PSIC, SEJ2006-09238/PSIC, SEJ2005-05205/EDU, CSD2007-00012, SEJ2007-60751/PSIC, GIU06/52, and BFI05.310. The authors thank Oxel Uribe for his technical support and Marc Brysbaert and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. The authors also thank Margaret Gillon Dowens for her immeasurable patience.

Notes

¹The German compound word Geschwindigkeitsanzeigetafel is formed by three constituents: geschwindigkeits (speed) + anzeige (indicate) + tafel (board).

²The authors also included a biased context condition, as well as the unbiased context condition. In the biased context condition, all nonwords in the lexical decision task were formed by combining two existing words (e.g., startstop, budrose). We will only refer to the unbiased context condition, since the manipulation we used in the present study did not include a biased context condition.

³We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

⁴Note that this was also the case in the study by Duñabeitia et al. (in press)), where they used strings that shared approximately 40% of the letters, and note that Giraudo and Grainger (2003) also failed to obtain significant masked form priming effects between words when the words shared approximately 40% of the letters (their significant form priming effect came from strings that shared at least 55% of the letters).