Constituent-priming investigations of the morphological activation of Japanese compound words

要旨

Abstract This chapter reports on two experiments conducted to investigate the morphological activation of two-kanji compound words using the constituent-morpheme priming paradigm with a series of very-brief masked stimulus onset asynchronicity (SOA) conditions. In contrast to Experiment 1 where the word-formation principle (WFP) conditions all involved Sino-Japanese (SJ) compound word targets, the WFP conditions for Experiment 2 included both SJ and native-Japanese (NJ) WFP targets. The results from both experiments provide evidence for the early contributions of morphological information to the lexical processing of compound words, in terms of advantages for left-to-right processing, for head-morphemes and for lexical-stratum. The results are discussed in the context of the Japanese lemma-unit model ( Joyce, 2002a , 2002b ).

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