Morphological parsing and the use of segmentation cues in reading Finnish compounds

This eye movement study investigated the use of two types of segmentation cues in processing long Finnish compounds. The cues were related to the vowel quality properties of the constituents and properties of the consonant starting the second constituent. In Finnish, front vowels never appear with back vowels in a lexeme, but different quality vowels can appear in different constituents in compounds. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that compounds with different vowel quality constituents are processed faster than those with same vowel quality constituents, but only if the first constituent is long. This indicates that the use of segmentation cues in processing long compounds depends on the ease of encoding the first constituent. Experiment 3 established that (a) the effect does not depend on the crucial vowels being adjacent and (b) processing is affected by the type of consonant beginning the second constituent (i.e., whether or not it could end a first constituent). (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.