Morphological dynamics in compound processing

Abstract

This paper explores the time-course of morphological processing of trimorphemic Finnish compounds. We find evidence for the parallel access to fullforms and morphological constituents diagnosed by the early effects of compound frequency, as well as early effects of left constituent frequency and family size. We also observe an interaction between compound frequency and both the left and the right constituent family sizes. Furthermore, our data show that suffixes embedded in the derived left constituent of a compound are efficiently used for establishing the boundary between compounds’ constituents. The success of segmentation of a compound is demonstrably modulated by the affixal salience of the embedded suffixes. We discuss implications of these findings for current models of morphological processing and propose a new model that views morphemes, combinations of morphemes and morphological paradigms as probabilistic sources of information that are interactively used in recognition of complex words.