Identifying existing and novel compound words in reading Finnish: an eye movement study

According to the dual-route race model of compound word identification (Pollatsek, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2000), the holistic route and the morphological decomposition route operate in tandem. Bertram and Hyönä (2003) posited that word length modulates the interplay between the two access routes. When a compound word is sufficiently short so that all or most of its letters fall on the foveal region when fixating it during reading, the holistic route gets a head start and completes faster than the morphological route and thus the word is more likely to be identified as a whole. On the other hand, when a compound word is so long that a subset of letters is beyond foveal reach, the identification is initiated by first recognizing the initial constituent followed by the recognition of the second constituent and that of the whole word. In their study examining the processing of novel compound words, Pollatsek et al. (2011) demonstrated that the decomposition route played even a more prominent role in processing novel than lexicalized compound words. Pollatsek et al. (2011) compared the processing of novel and existing Finnish compound words by manipulating the frequency of first constituent as an independent word, separately for long (average length of 13 letters) existing and novel compound words. The length of the first constituent as well as the frequency of the second constituent was matched across conditions. For first fixation duration, which indexes early effects in word processing, an effect of first-constituent frequency was observed that was similar in size for existing and novel compound words. For gaze duration (i.e. the summed duration of fixations made on the word before exiting to the right or left) first-constituent frequency was greater for novel than existing compound words. For the latest stages of processing during the first-pass reading, indexed by fixation time spent on the target word after fixating away from the first constituent but before exiting the word, only a main effect of novelty was observed. As regards to the processing of long novel compound words, the pattern of results was taken to suggest a twostage process. During the first stage, lexical access is achieved for the compound word constituents. During the second stage, the meaning of the novel compound word is composed out of the constituent meanings. The second stage is assumed to take longer when the frequency of the first constituent is low, because the prototypical relationships that the low-frequency first constituent would be engaged in compounding are not firmly established. In the present study, we further investigated the processing of novel and lexicalized Finnish two-noun compound words. This time we manipulated the frequency of the second constituent (the compound head). It was done separately for existing and novel compound words. Moreover, we also manipulated the length of the compound words. If indeed word length strongly determines the interplay between the holistic and decomposition route in compound word identification, as argued by Bertram and Hyönä (2003), the manipulation of the second-constituent frequency tapping into the decomposition process should result in different types of processing especially for short existing versus novel compound words. Short existing compound words are more likely be identified by the holistic route, whereas short novel compound words have to be processed via the morphological decomposition route. For long compound words, on the other hand, the manipulation of the second-constituent frequency should lead to less dramatic differences between existing and novel compounds, as the decomposition