Conceptual relations compete during auditory and visual compound word recognition

Daniel Schmidtke, Christina L. Gagné, Victor Kuperman, Thomas L. Spalding, Benjamin V. Tucker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Previous research has shown that compound word recognition involves selecting a relational meaning (e.g. “box for letters” for letterbox) out of a set of competing relational meanings for the same compound. We conducted five experiments to investigate the role of competition between relational meanings across visual and auditory compound word processing. In Experiment 1 conceptual relations judgments were collected for 604 English compound words. From this database we computed an information-theoretic measure of competition between conceptual relations–entropy of conceptual relations. Experiments 2 and 3 report that greater entropy (i.e. increased competition) among a set of conceptual relations leads to longer latencies for compounds in auditory lexical decision. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrate the same result in two visual lexical decision studies. These findings provide evidence that relational meanings are constructed and evaluated during compound recognition, regardless of whether compounds are recognised via auditory or visual input.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)923-942
Number of pages20
JournalLanguage, Cognition and Neuroscience
Volume33
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 9 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Auditory word recognition
  • compound word recognition
  • conceptual combination
  • lexical decision
  • morphology
  • visual word recognition

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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