The representation and processing of compounds words
Gary Libben, Christina L. Gagné, Wolfgang U. Dressler
Abstract
Compound words may be the language structures that are most fundamental to human linguistic ability and most revealing of its dynamics.We review evidence to date on the representation and processing of compound words in the mind and highlight the implications that they have for the broader understanding of language functioning and lexical knowledge.Our examination of the nature of compounds focuses on their deceptive simplicity as well as their dual nature as words and lexical combinations.Compound processing appears to be advantaged when compounds belong to morphologically productive families and when they are both formally and semantically transparent.We also claim that current findings offer converging evidence that compound word processing is characterized by both whole word and constituent activation for compound types.