Constituent Processing in Compound and Pseudocompound Words

Theories of multimorphemic word recognition generally posit that constituent representations are involved in accessing the whole multimorphemic word. Gagne et al. (2018) found that pseudoconstituents and constituents become available when processing pseudocompound and compound masked primes (e.g., sea is activated in season and seabird). Across four experiments, we examine whether readers access the semantic information of such pseudoconstituents and constituents. Experiments 1 and 2 show that masked pseudocompound and compound primes do not influence lexical decision responses to semantic associates of their pseudoconstituents or constituents (e.g., seabird and season do not influence processing of ocean, an associate of sea). Experiments 3 and 4 show that an associate of the first constituent does not influence processing of the pseudocompound but does facilitate processing of the compound (e.g., ocean facilitates processing of seabird but not of season). While compounds have been found to be sensitive to the activation of their constituents via semantic priming (e.g., El-Bialy et al., 2013; Sandra, 1990), our findings suggest that primarily morphological, rather than semantic, activation of the constituents occurs in a masked priming paradigm. Public Significance Statement Morphological information makes an important contribution to reading words, so much so that not only are constituent morphemes (e.g., car in carport) activated, even pseudomorphemes (e.g., car in carpet) are activated. However, this study finds that although both morphemes and pseudomorphemes are activated, the semantic information associated with the morphemes and pseudomorphemes plays a relatively small role in reading such words.