The time-course of morphological constraints: Evidence from eye-movements during reading

Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. * rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2007-09, Vol.104 (3), p.476-494
Main Authors: Cunnings, Ian, Clahsen, Harald
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition
Compounds
Eye movement
Eye Movements
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Inflection
Language
Language Patterns
Lexicology
Male
Morphology
Morphology (Languages)
Nouns
Processing
Production and perception of written language
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reading
Reading Processes
Reading Research
Research methods
Saccades
Semantics
Sight
Word Recognition
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Summary:Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. * rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater vs. mice eater), a contrast that has been ascribed to the semantics of compounds. Measuring eye-movements during reading, this study examined how morphological and semantic information become available over time during the processing of a compound. We found that the morphological constraint affected both early and late eye-movement measures, whereas the semantic constraint for singular non-heads only affected late measures of processing. These results indicate that morphological information becomes available earlier than semantic information during the processing of compounds.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.010