Bertram, R. 1 , Kuperman, V. 2 , Baayen, H. 3 & Hyönä, J. 1
1 University of Turku, Finland
2 McMaster University, Canada
3 University of Alberta, Canada
Inserting a hyphen in Dutch and Finnish compounds is most often illegal given spelling conventions. However, the current eye movement experiments on triconstituent Dutch compounds like voetbalbond (Eng: footballassociation) (Experiment 1) and triconstituent Finnish compounds like lentokenttätaksi (Eng: airporttaxi) (Experiment 2 + 3) show that inserting a hyphen at constituent boundaries does not have to be detrimental to compound processing. In fact, when hyphens were inserted at the major constituent boundary (voetbal-bond; lentokenttä-taksi), processing of the first part (voetbal; lentokenttä) turns out to be faster when it is followed by a hyphen than when it is legally concatenated. In addition, by the end of the experiments, both Dutch and Finnish compounds with hyphenation at the major boundary were read faster than their concatenated counterparts. In contrast, hyphenation at the minor constituent boundary (voet-balbond; lento-kenttätaksi) was detrimental to compound processing speed. The results imply that the hyphen is an efficient segmentation cue and that spelling illegalities can be overcome easily, as long as they make sense.