Recognizing English Compound Words: The Role of Morphological Family Size
The current study used lexical decision, naming, and eye-tracking tasks to examine the role of morphological family size in compound word recognition. Family size was manipulated using a factorial design. In the naming and lexical decision tasks, participants responded faster to compounds from large as opposed to small morphological families. In the eye-tracking task, target words were embedded into sentences; family size effects were found in gaze duration, number of fixations, and probability of refixation, but not in first fixation durations. These results suggest that compounds from large morphological families are easier to recognize than compounds from small morphological families, and that this is a semantic effect. Implications for the organization of the mental lexicon are discussed.