The time-course of morphological constraints: Evidence from eye-movements during reading

Cunnings, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5318-0186 and Clahsen, H. (2007) The time-course of morphological constraints: Evidence from eye-movements during reading. Cognition, 104 (3). pp. 476-494. ISSN 0010-0277 doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.010

Abstract/Summary

Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. *rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater vs. mice eater), a contrast that has been ascribed to the semantics of compounds. Measuring eyemovements during reading, this study examined how morphological and semantic information become available over time during the processing of a compound. We found that the morphological constraint affected both early and late eye-movement measures, whereas the semantic constraint for singular non-heads only affected late measures of processing. These results indicate that morphological information becomes available earlier than semantic information during the processing of compounds.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/34384
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.010
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
Publisher	Elsevier
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