The hyphen as a segmentation cue in triconstituent compound processing: It’s getting better all the time

Morphological and visual cues in compound word reading: Eye-tracking evidence from Hebrew

Hebrew noun-noun compounds offer a valuable opportunity to study the long-standing question of how morphologically complex words are processed during reading. Specifically, in some morpho-syntactic environments, the first (head) noun of a compound carries a suffix-a clear orthographic marker of being part of a compound-whereas in others it is homographic with a stand-alone noun. In addition to this morphological cue, Hebrew occasionally employs hyphenation as a visual signal that two nouns, which are typically separated by a space, are combined in a compound. In a factorial design, we orthogonally manipulated the morphological and the visual cues and recorded eye movements of 75 proficient Hebrew readers while they read sentences with embedded compounds. The effect of hyphenation on reading times was inhibitory. This slow-down was significantly weaker in compounds where the syntactic relation between constituents was overtly marked by a suffix compared with compounds without a morphological marker. We interpret these findings as evidence that hyphenation is largely a redundant cue but morphological markers of compounding are psychologically valid cues for semantic integration of compounds. We discuss the implications of this finding for accounts of morphological processing.

The reality of hierarchical morphological structure in multimorphemic words

This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.

When experience meets language statistics: Individual variability in processing English compound words

Statistical patterns of language use demonstrably affect language comprehension and language production. This study set out to determine whether the variable amount of exposure to such patterns leads to individual differences in reading behavior as measured via eye-movements. Previous studies have demonstrated that more proficient readers are less influenced by distributional biases in language (e.g., frequency, predictability, transitional probability) than poor readers. We hypothesized that a probabilistic bias that is characteristic of written but not spoken language would preferentially affect readers with greater exposure to printed materials in general and to the specific pattern engendering the bias. Readers of varying reading experience were presented with sentences including English compound words that can occur in 2 spelling formats with differing probabilities: concatenated (windowsill, used 40% of the time) or spaced (window sill, 60%). Linear mixed effects multiple regression models fitted to the eye-movement measures showed that the probabilistic bias toward the presented spelling had a stronger facilitatory effect on compounds that occurred more frequently (in any spelling) or belonged to larger morphological families, and on readers with higher scores on a test of exposure-to-print. Thus, the amount of support toward the compound's spelling is effectively exploited when reading, but only when the spelling patterns are entrenched in an individual's mental lexicon via overall exposure to print and to compounds with alternating spelling. We argue that research on the interplay of language use and structure is incomplete without proper characterization of how particular individuals, with varying levels of experience and skill, learn these language structures.

Association norms for German noun compounds and their constituents

We present a collection of association norms for 246 German depictable compound nouns and their constituents, comprising 58,652 association tokens distributed over 26,004 stimulus-associate pair types. Analyses of the data revealed that participants mainly provided noun associates, followed by adjective and verb associates. In corpus analyses, co-occurrence values for compounds and their associates were below those for nouns in general and their associates. The semantic relations between compound stimuli and their associates were more often co-hyponymy and hypernymy and less often hyponymy than for associations to nouns in general. Finally, we found a moderate correlation between the overlap of the associations to compounds and their constituents and the degree of semantic transparency. These data represent a collection of associations to German compound nouns and their constituents that constitute a valuable resource concerning the lexical semantic properties of the compound stimuli and the semantic relations between the stimuli and their associates. More specifically, the norms can be used for stimulus selection, hypothesis testing, and further research on morphologically complex words. The norms are available in text format (utf-8 encoding) as supplemental materials.

The Role of Hyphens at the Constituent Boundary in Compound Word Identification

The current eye-movement study investigated whether a salient segmentation cue like the hyphen facilitates the identification of long and short compound words. The study was conducted in Finnish, where compound words exist in great abundance. The results showed that long hyphenated compounds (musiikki-ilta) are identified faster than concatenated ones (yllätystulos), but short hyphenated compounds (ilta-asu) are identified slower than their concatenated counterparts (kesäsää). This pattern of results is explained by the visual acuity principle ( Bertram & Hyönä, 2003 ): A long compound word does not fully fit in the foveal area, where visual acuity is at its best. Therefore, its identification begins with the access of the initial constituent and this sequential processing is facilitated by the hyphen. However, a short compound word fits in the foveal area, and consequently the hyphen slows down processing by encouraging sequential processing in cases where it is possible to extract and use information of the second constituent as well.

Flexible letter-position coding is unlikely to hold for morphologically rich languages

We agree with Frost that flexible letter-position coding is unlikely to be a universal property of word recognition across different orthographies. We argue that it is particularly unlikely in morphologically rich languages like Finnish. We also argue that dual-route models are not overly flexible and that they are well equipped to adapt to the linguistic environment at hand.

A universal approach to modeling visual word recognition and reading: Not only possible, but also inevitable

I have argued that orthographic processing cannot be understood and modeled without considering the manner in which orthographic structure represents phonological, semantic, and morphological information in a given writing system. A reading theory, therefore, must be a theory of the interaction of the reader with his/her linguistic environment. This outlines a novel approach to studying and modeling visual word recognition, an approach that focuses on the common cognitive principles involved in processing printed words across different writing systems. These claims were challenged by several commentaries that contested the merits of my general theoretical agenda, the relevance of the evolution of writing systems, and the plausibility of finding commonalities in reading across orthographies. Other commentaries extended the scope of the debate by bringing into the discussion additional perspectives. My response addresses all these issues. By considering the constraints of neurobiology on modeling reading, developmental data, and a large scope of cross-linguistic evidence, I argue that front-end implementations of orthographic processing that do not stem from a comprehensive theory of the complex information conveyed by writing systems do not present a viable approach for understanding reading. The common principles by which writing systems have evolved to represent orthographic, phonological, and semantic information in a language reveal the critical distributional characteristics of orthographic structure that govern reading behavior. Models of reading should thus be learning models, primarily constrained by cross-linguistic developmental evidence that describes how the statistical properties of writing systems shape the characteristics of orthographic processing. When this approach is adopted, a universal model of reading is possible.

The role of visual acuity and segmentation cues in compound word identification

Studies are reviewed that demonstrate how the identification of compound words during reading is constrained by the foveal area of the eye. When compound words are short, their letters can be identified during a single fixation, leading to the whole-word route dominating word recognition from early on. Hence, marking morpheme boundaries visually by means of hyphens slows down the processing of short words by encouraging morphological decomposition when holistic processing is a feasible option. In contrast, the decomposition route dominates the early stages of identifying long compound words. Thus, visual marking of morpheme boundaries facilitates processing of long compound words, unless the initial fixation made on the word lands very close to the morpheme boundary. The reviewed pattern of results is explained by the visual acuity principle (Bertram and Hyönä, 2003) and the dual-route framework of morphological processing.