Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Alberta, Corbett Hall, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2G4, Canada.
Department of Counselling Psychology, Yorkville University, Fredericton, NB, E3C 2R9, Canada.
Behav Res Methods. 2024 Mar;56(3):2606-2622. doi: 10.3758/s13428-023-02170-w. Epub 2023 Jul 18.
The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which mimic, but do not truly possess, a compound morphemic structure. These pseudo-compounds can be parsed into two free morpheme constituents (e.g., car-pet), but neither constituent functions as a morpheme within the overall word structure. The items were manually coded as pseudo-compounds, further coded for features related to their morphological structure (e.g., presence of multiple affixes, as in ruler-ship), and summarized using common psycholinguistic variables (e.g., length, frequency). This paper also presents an example analysis comparing the lexical decision response times between compound words, pseudo-compound words, and monomorphemic words. Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words did not differ in response time, and both groups had slower response times than compound words. This analysis replicates the facilitatory effect of compound constituents during lexical processing, and demonstrates the need to emphasize the pseudo-constituent structure of pseudo-compounds to parse their effects. Further applications of LaDEP include both psycholinguistic studies investigating the nature of human word processing or production and educational or clinical settings evaluating the impact of linguistic features on language learning and impairments. Overall, the items within LaDEP provide a varied and representative sample of the population of English pseudo-compounds which may be used to facilitate further research related to morphological decomposition, lexical access, meaning construction, orthographical influences, and much more.
LaDEP（英文伪复合词大数据库）包含近 7500 个英文单词，这些单词虽然模仿了复合词的形态结构，但实际上并不具备复合词的结构。这些伪复合词可以被解析成两个自由语素成分（如 car-pet），但这两个成分在整个单词结构中都不作为语素。这些项目被手动编码为伪复合词，进一步根据与它们的形态结构相关的特征进行编码（例如，存在多个词缀，如 ruler-ship），并使用常见的心理语言学变量进行总结（例如，长度、频率）。本文还介绍了一个示例分析，比较了复合词、伪复合词和单语素词的词汇判断反应时。伪复合词和单语素词的反应时没有差异，而且这两个组的反应时都比复合词慢。这种分析复制了复合成分在词汇处理过程中的促进作用，并表明需要强调伪复合词的伪成分结构，以解析它们的作用。LaDEP 的进一步应用包括研究人类词汇处理或生成本质的心理语言学研究，以及评估语言特征对语言学习和障碍影响的教育或临床环境。总的来说，LaDEP 中的项目提供了一个多样化和有代表性的英语伪复合词群体样本，可以用来促进与形态分解、词汇访问、意义构建、正字法影响等相关的进一步研究。
