[PS-1.11] The processing of morphologically complex words in German: A simple combination

Bronk, M. , Bölte, J. , Zwitserlood, P. & Lüttmann, H.

Institute for Psychology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

There is growing evidence that morphologically complex words are split into their constituents as they are processed. The question, whether this decomposition facilitates or hinders visual word recognition, remains yet to be solved. Since the constituent frequency tends to be higher than the compound frequency, one might expect facilitation. On the other hand, integrating constituents into a compound might result in additional time costs compared to the processing of a monomorphematic word of comparable lexical properties. We present data from two reaction-time studies which explored the influence of the constituents’ word frequency on the recognition of compounds in comparison to the recognition of morphologically simple words. Using a visual lexicon decision task, we chose pairs of German compounds that shared either their first (Postbote, Postfach; mailman, post-office box), or their second constituent (Terminplan, Stadtplan; time schedule, city map), and matched them with morphologically simple words in length and frequency. Compounds whose non-shared constituent had a high word frequency were recognized significantly faster than compounds whose non-shared constituent had a low word frequency. The comparison of these reaction times to those of the matched morphologically simple words supports the assumption that integrating the constituents into a compound comes along with time costs that consume the compounds’ head start due to higher word frequencies of their constituents.