Compound word processing: Orthographic, Morphological, Semantic, and Conceptual Effects

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Cognitive productivity, the ability to combine known concepts and words into new meanings and linguistic constructions, is one of the most important human abilities. The ultimate goal of my research is to better understand the conceptual and language systems, and how these systems lead to human productivity. My focus has been on compound words (e.g., snowball, hogwash) and modifier-noun phrases (e.g., snow bucket, hog barn). These small linguistic constructions provide an important test case for understanding processes and sources of information from the language and conceptual systems because they involve the construction of new meanings from the constituent morphemes/words. My work has examined how compound word processing relates to modifier-noun phrase processing, and has demonstrated that compound word processing, like modifier-noun phrase processing, involves an obligatory attempt at creating a productive meaning based on the constituents of the compound word, even when it is not appropriate and has a processing cost. Critically, compound word meanings are not simply activated or retrieved by the lexical system. Attempts at meaning construction require that the constituents be identified in the compound word and therefore it is critical to know how morphological and semantic information interact with orthographic (e.g., letter identification) sources of information in compound word processing. Similarly, meaning creation involves coordinating different conceptual representations, so the role of conceptual processes is critical, and rarely studied in compound word research, outside my research program. The proposed research program builds on my previous research investigating how morphological and semantic information impact compound word processing and allow meaning construction attempts. I will investigate the roles of orthography and conceptual information, and their relation to semantic and morphological information, in compound word processing. The general approach is to compare compound words with different semantic or conceptual characteristics, or to compare compound words with non-compounds, such as pseudo-compounds (words that only look like compounds, e.g., carpet), which allows me to investigate the information sources and their interactions. These comparisons will be examined across various tasks that focus on word access, word production, or orthographic judgments, allowing me to investigate different aspects of processing. This work will ultimately lead to a full theory of compound word processing, incorporating sources of information from orthographic processes, through morphology and semantics, to conceptual processes. Understanding productivity, even in these smallest linguistic constructions, is dauntingly complex and difficult. However, this work will greatly extend what is known about productive meaning construction, and about how such constructions continue to influence the language and conceptual systems.