Cunnings Ian, Clahsen Harald
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, C04 3SQ, UK.
Cognition. 2007 Sep;104(3):476-94. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.010. Epub 2006 Aug 28.
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 eye-movements 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.
非中心名词可以是不规则复数形式，但不能是规则复数形式（例如“mice eater”对比“*rats eater”），有人认为这种差异源于复合词内部修饰语的形态限制。此外，复合词内部使用裸名词形式优于复数形式（例如“mouse eater”对比“mice eater”），这种差异归因于复合词的语义。本研究通过测量阅读过程中的眼动，考察了在复合词加工过程中形态和语义信息是如何随时间获取的。我们发现，形态限制对早期和晚期眼动指标均有影响，而单数非中心名词的语义限制仅影响晚期加工指标。这些结果表明，在复合词加工过程中，形态信息比语义信息更早获取。
