Constituent processing in compound and pseudocompound words.

Theories of multimorphemic word recognition generally posit that constituent representations are involved in accessing the whole multimorphemic word. Gagné et al. (2018) found that pseudoconstituents and constituents become available when processing pseudocompound and compound masked primes (e.g., is activated in and ). Across four experiments, we examine whether readers access the semantic information of such pseudoconstituents and constituents. Experiments 1 and 2 show that masked pseudocompound and compound primes do not influence lexical decision responses to semantic associates of their pseudoconstituents or constituents (e.g., and do not influence processing of , an associate of ). Experiments 3 and 4 show that an associate of the first constituent does not influence processing of the pseudocompound but does facilitate processing of the compound (e.g., facilitates processing of but not of ). While compounds have been found to be sensitive to the activation of their constituents via semantic priming (e.g., El-Bialy et al., 2013; Sandra, 1990), our findings suggest that primarily morphological, rather than semantic, activation of the constituents occurs in a masked priming paradigm. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).