The Role of Hyphenation in English Compound Word Processing

The present study examines the role of hyphenation in the processing of English compound words. English compound words that appear in the English language as both hyphenated (eg. grown-up) and unspaced (eg. grownup) were chosen as target stimuli. Half of the compound words chosen appeared more frequently in their hyphenated form while the other half of the compounds appeared more frequently in their unspaced form. The words were embedded in sentences in both their hyphenated and unspaced forms. Participants were instructed to read a randomly selected set of sentences while their eye movements were recorded. First fixation duration showed a significant interaction between compound type and spatial layout presentation which indicated a significant processing gain for unspaced compound words shown as hyphenated. However, for compound words more familiar as unspaced, gaze durations significantly increased with the addition of the hyphen. There was no significant main effect for compound type or spatial layout presentation in gaze duration, indicating no significant benefit from the transformation of a hyphenated compound into an unspaced compound. The results indicate that while spatial segmentation benefits initial word processing by facilitating lexical decomposition, it has detrimental affects on later word processing when whole word retrieval occurs.