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 construction process is necessary, has shown that relational interpretations compete to be selected during comprehension, and that increased competition leads to increased processing difficulty. The current project investigates relational competition during the processing of transparent and opaque English compounds. The results show that the diversity of possible relational interpretations affects the ease with which participants can make a lexical decision for a compound. This is true even for opaque compounds, where the identification of the meaning of the compound cannot, by definition, be the result of the meaning construction process. This suggests that initiation of the meaning construction process is obligatory during compound processing.
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Cited by (10)
Cited by ten other publications
Benjamin, Shaina & Daniel Schmidtke
2023. Conceptual combination during novel and existing compound word reading in context: A self-paced reading study. Memory & Cognition 51:5 ► pp. 1170 ff.
Cruz, Karen Pérez, Chelsa Patel, Jazlynn Steinbach, Mohamed Barre, Holly Kibbins, Dixie Wong, Alexander Taikh, Christina L. Gagné & Thomas L. Spalding
2022. Patterns in CAOSS: Distributed representations predict variation in relational interpretations for familiar and novel compound words. Cognitive Psychology 134 ► pp. 101471 ff.
Creemers, Ava & David Embick
2021. Retrieving stem meanings in opaque words during auditory lexical processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 36:9 ► pp. 1107 ff.
Schmidtke, Daniel, Christina L. Gagné, Victor Kuperman, Thomas L. Spalding & Benjamin V. Tucker
2018. Conceptual relations compete during auditory and visual compound word recognition. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 33:7 ► pp. 923 ff.
Schmidtke, Daniel, Christina L. Gagné, Victor Kuperman & Thomas L. Spalding
2018. Language experience shapes relational knowledge of compound words. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 25:4 ► pp. 1468 ff.
Marelli, Marco, Christina L. Gagné & Thomas L. Spalding
2017. Compounding as Abstract Operation in Semantic Space: Investigating relational effects through a large-scale, data-driven computational model. Cognition 166 ► pp. 207 ff.
Gagné, Christina L. & Thomas L. Spalding
2016. Written production of English compounds: effects of morphology and semantic transparency. Morphology 26:2 ► pp. 133 ff.
Schmidtke, Daniel, Victor Kuperman, Christina L. Gagné & Thomas L. Spalding
2016. Competition between conceptual relations affects compound recognition: the role of entropy. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 23:2 ► pp. 556 ff.
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