a IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo , Venice , Italy.
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2014;31(1-2):184-218. doi: 10.1080/02643294.2014.903915.
Theories on the processing of compound words differ on the role attributed to access to individual constituents. These theories are mostly based on empirical evidence obtained in experimental settings that could induce artificial effects normally not occurring in natural processing. In this study we investigated the processing of compounds as compared to noncompound complex words in Italian through a reading task with eye movement recording. We included both head-initial and head-final compounds, in order to test whether the position of the head may influence the reading process. After ruling out the effects of length and frequency, we observed that pseudocompounds (i.e., words with a segment homograph to a real word in the leftmost part) elicited longer total reading times than all other types of complex words, including compounds. Furthermore, head-final compounds elicited longer total reading times than head-initial compounds. The results suggest that a word structure resembling a compound may induce longer processing, presumably related to unexpected morphological structures. The results also converge with previous evidence that in some cases there is a higher processing costs for head-final as opposed to head-initial compounds, possibly indexing a reanalysis of the stimulus in order to correctly assign the constituent properties. However, a deeper analysis restricted to compounds revealed a more complex scenario where several variables interact with headedness (namely, first and second constituent frequency, compound frequency, and compound length), and future studies are needed to discriminate among possible interpretations. Overall, our findings suggest that longer reading times are related to solving incongruities due to noncanonical structures, rather than to morphologically complexity per se.
关于复合词处理的理论在归因于访问单个成分的作用上存在分歧。这些理论主要基于在实验环境中获得的经验证据，这些证据可能会产生在自然处理中通常不会出现的人为效应。在这项研究中，我们通过眼动记录的阅读任务，研究了意大利语中复合词与非复合复杂词的处理。我们既包括了头序复合词，也包括了尾序复合词，以检验词首位置是否会影响阅读过程。在排除了长度和频率的影响后，我们观察到伪复合词（即，在最左边部分与真实单词有一个同源片段的单词）比其他所有类型的复杂词，包括复合词，引起的总阅读时间更长。此外，尾序复合词比头序复合词引起的总阅读时间更长。结果表明，类似于复合词的词结构可能会引起更长的处理时间，这可能与意想不到的形态结构有关。这些结果也与先前的证据一致，即在某些情况下，尾序复合词比头序复合词的处理成本更高，可能需要重新分析刺激，以便正确分配成分属性。然而，对复合词的更深入分析揭示了一个更复杂的情况，其中几个变量与词首位置（即第一和第二成分频率、复合词频率和复合词长度）相互作用，需要进一步的研究来区分可能的解释。总的来说，我们的发现表明，更长的阅读时间与解决由于非规范结构引起的不一致有关，而不是与形态复杂性本身有关。
