Gary Libben

Compound fracture: The role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness

This paper explores the role of semantic transparency in the representation and processing of English compounds. We focus on the question of whether semantic transparency is best viewed as a property of the entire multimorphemic string or as a property of constituent morphemes. Accordingly, we investigated the processing of English compound nouns that were categorized in terms of the semantic transparency of each of their constituents. Fully transparent such as bedroom are those in which the meanings of each of the constituents are transparently represented in the meaning of the compound as a whole. These compounds were contrasted with compounds such as strawberry, in which only the second constituent is semantically transparent, jailbird, in which only the first constituent is transparent, and hogwash, in which neither constituent is semantically transparent. We propose that significant insights can be achieved through such analysis of the transparency of individual morphemes. The two experiments that we report present evidence that both semantically transparent compounds and semantically opaque compounds show morphological constituency. The semantic transparency of the morphological head (the second constituent in a morphologically right-headed language such as English) was found to play a significant role in overall lexical decision latencies, in patterns of decomposition, and in the effects of stimulus repetition within the experiment.

Semantic transparency in the processing of compounds : Consequences for representation, processing, and impairment

The role of semantic transparency in morphological processing in general and in compound processing in particular is examined. It is argued that the notion of semantic transparency is crucial to an account of how compounds are represented and processed in the mind. A sketch of a model is proposed in which compound processing is described in terms of stimulus properties, lexical properties, and conceptual properties. The model represents the notion of semantic transparency in terms of a four-way classification of the semantic relationship between a compounds constituents and the corresponding independent morphemes. It also distinguishes between semantically componential and noncomponential compounds. It is proposed that the model offers a framework within which experimental psycholinguistic findings can be understood and within which aphasic deficits associated with compound processing can be characterized. As an example of this, the paper presents a reanalysis of an aphasic patient who exhibits the tendency to interpret semantically opaque compounds as though they were transparent and to interpret opaque compounds in terms of a blend of constituent and whole-word meaning. It is argued that the underlying deficit in this patient is the failure for inhibition to result from the competition among stimuli at the conceptual level of representation.

Processing compounds: A cross-linguistic study.

This study explores the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness in the on-line visual recognition of French and Bulgarian compounds using a constituent repetition priming paradigm. The results reported show significant constituent priming effects for both languages. Moreover, distinct priming patterns emerged, demonstrating that the semantic transparency of individual constituents, their position in the string, and morphological headedness interact in the processing of compounds.

The representation and processing of compound words

1. Why Study Compound Processing? An Overview of the Issues 2. Compound Types 3. Compound Representation and Processing 4. The Neuropsychology of Compound Words 5. Preschool Childrens Acquisition of Compounds 6. Doghouse/Chien-maison/Niche: Compounds in Bilinguals 7. Conceptual Combination: Implictions for the Mental Lexicon 8. Processing Chinese Compounds: A Survey of the Literature References Index

Semantics and semantic errors: Implicit access to semantic information from words and nonwords in deep dyslexia

In this paper we describe dissociations of implicit versus explicit access to semantic information in a patient with deep dyslexia. This acquired reading disorder is characterized by the production of morphological (e.g., SLEEP read as SLEEPING) and semantic errors (e.g., HEART read as BLOOD) and consequently provides a potential window into the operation of both aspects of the language system. The deep dyslexic patient in this study (JO) demonstrated implicit semantic access to items in a number of tasks despite the fact that she was unable to correctly read these items aloud. The findings from this study are consistent with a model of lexical deficits that distinguishes between explicit and implicit access to lexical representations on the basis of inhibitory processes.

The processing of interfixed German compounds

This postulate by Goethe (*1749), the first protagonist of a new discipline of morphology (albeit first only within biology), confronts us with the main problem of processing studies of morphology: Are morphological constructions processed as wholes or with regard to their parts or, if both, under which conditions? This question has been of central concern in the psycholinguistic literature on lexical processing over the past quarter century. The debate in this area was initiated by the provocative claim put forward by Taft and Forster (1975; 1976) that multimorphemic words are represented in the mental lexicon in terms of their constituents and that multimorphemic word recognition routinely involves a morphological decomposition procedure. Subsequent experimentation, however, has pointed to the view that neither this strong position nor the strong contrary position advocated by Butterworth (1983) accounts for the performance of language users across languages, task types, and stimulus categories (see McQueen and Cutler (1998) for a recent review). Even within individual categories of morphological construction, experimental results have led to a rather complex view of the role of morphology in lexical processing. Compound word processing, for example, has been shown to provide evidence for both whole word representation and constituent activation. In general, semantically transparent compounds show constituent activation, whereas semantically opaque compounds show greater evidence of whole word activation (Libben 1998; Sandra 1990; Zwitserlood 1994). Recent work by Libben, Derwing and de Almeida (1999) has also suggested that the processing of compounds may involve the creation of multiple representations that are simultaneously computed and evaluated. Libben et al. (1999) claim that the processing of compounds is not guided by a principle of parsing efficiency but rather by a mechanism that uncovers the maximum number of morphemes within a multimorphemic string.

Are morphological structures computed during word recognition

In the recent literature in generative morphology, it has been assumed that multimorphemic words must be characterized as having a hierarchical internal structure which is expressible in the form of morphological trees. This paper reports on an experiment which addresses the following question: Are these structures relevant to complex word recognition? In a naming latency experiment, subjects were presented with prefixed and suffixed nonsense roots. The use of stimuli such as these allowed for the control of real word effects such as frequency and semantic plausibility and made it possible to systematically vary the configuration of the morphological trees. Significant response time differences were found between the morphologically illegal forms and legal configurations. This was taken as evidence that subjects do compute morphological representations. Because no differences were found between legal left-branching structures and legal right-branching structures, it was concluded that morphological computation is not sensitive to the serial ordering of morphemes within a complex word.

The nature of compounds: A psychocentric perspective

Although compound words often seem to be words that themselves contain words, this paper argues that this is not the case for the vast majority of lexicalized compounds. Rather, it is claimed that as a result of acts of lexical processing, the constituents of compound words develop into new lexical representations. These representations are bound to specific morphological roles and positions (e.g., head, modifier) within a compound word. The development of these positionally bound compound constituents creates a rich network of lexical knowledge that facilitates compound processing and also creates some of the well-documented patterns in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic study of compounding.

Lexical Attrition in Younger and Older Bilingual Adults.

Healthy monolingual older adults experience changes in their lexical abilities. Bilingual individuals immersed in an environment in which their second language is dominant experience lexical changes, or attrition, in their first language. Changes in lexical skills in the first language of older individuals who are bilinguals, therefore, can be attributed to the typical processes accompanying older age, the typical processes accompanying first‐language attrition in bilingual contexts, or both. The challenge, then, in understanding how lexical skills change in bilingual older individuals, lies in dissociating these processes. This paper addresses the difficulty of teasing apart the effects of ageing and attrition in older bilinguals and proposes some solutions. It presents preliminary results from a study of lexical processing in bilingual younger and older individuals. Processing differences were found for the older bilingual participants in their first language (L1), but not in their second language (L2). It is concluded that the lexical behaviour found for older bilinguals in this study can be attributed to L1 attrition and not to processes of ageing. These findings are discussed in the context of previous reports concerning changes in lexical skills associated with typical ageing and those associated with bilingual L1 attrition.

Changing morphological structures: The effect of sentence context on the interpretation of structurally ambiguous English trimorphemic words

Morphological parsing has often been studied with words in isolation. In this study we used sentence context to investigate how structural analyses of morphologically complex words are affected by the semantic content of their carrier sentences. Our main stimuli were trimorphemic ambiguous words such as unlockable (meaning either “not able to be locked” or “able to be unlocked”). We treat these words as structurally ambiguous such that the meaning of the words is determined by the perceived organisation of their constituent morphemes. The effect and malleability of this structural organisation were examined in one offline rating experiment and one cross-modal priming experiment with ambiguous words embedded in sentence context. The results of the study suggest that morphologically ambiguous words do show two interpretations and that the balance of these interpretations can be affected by the semantics of the sentence in which they are embedded. We interpret the pattern of data to suggest that when structurally ambiguous words are presented in isolation, word-internal factors determine which interpretation is to be preferred. However, in strongly constraining sentence contexts, these preferred parses are modified online to be consistent with the semantics of the entire sentence structure.