Prelexical Decomposition of Compound and Pseudocompound Words

Abstract

Previous studies on morphologically complex words suggest early decomposition in the visual word process. In that case, morpheme-like constituents of pseudocompound words (e.g. mushroom) should also be decomposed during the early stage of visual recognition, although such effects should disappear quickly, as the decomposition does not help in the identification of the whole word. Experiment 1 assessed priming effects of compound words and pseudocompound words on their constituents at SOAs of 150ms and 500 ms, using masked primes. At the short SOA, both word types primed their first constituents (e.g., blackboard primed black, mushroom primed mush), supporting the hypothesis of early decomposition. At the long SOA, the compound words primed both of their constituents, while the pseudocompound words continued to prime their first constituents. Experiment 2 repeated Experiment 1 with the long SOA condition changed to 300ms. The results were the same for compound words, but priming effects disappeared for the pseudocompound words at 300ms SOA. These findings suggest an early segmentation of morpheme-like word parts based on the orthographical structure of multisyllabic words.