Eye movements during the reading of compound words and the influence of lexeme meaning

Abstract

We examined the use of lexeme meaning during the processing of spatially unified bilexemic compound words by manipulating both the location and the word frequency of the lexeme that primarily defined the meaning of a compound (i.e., the dominant lexeme). The semantically dominant and nondominant lexemes occupied either the beginning or the ending compound word location, and the beginning and ending lexemes could be either high- or low-frequency words. Three tasks were used--lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading--all of which focused on the effects of lexeme frequency as a function of lexeme dominance. The results revealed a larger word frequency effect for the dominant lexeme in all three tasks. Eye movements during sentence reading further revealed larger word frequency effects for the dominant lexeme via several oculomotor motor measures, including the duration of the first fixation on a compound word. These findings favor theoretical conceptions in which the use of lexeme meaning is an integral part of the compound recognition process.

Figure 1

The first-fixation durations for HL and LH compounds as a function of compound type.