University Paris 7 I_aboratoire Documentaire ot Linguistigue 1 2, place Jussieu 1-"-75221 Paris CEDEX 05 The essenti~d feature of a lexicon-grammar is that the elementary unit of computation and storage is the simple sentence: snbleet-verb-complement(s).-this type of representation is obviously needed for verbs: limiting a verb to its shape has no meaning other than typographic, ~ir]ce a verb c...

Participants read sentences in which novel and lexicalized two-constituent compound words appeared while their eye movements were measured. The frequency of the first constituent of the compounds was also varied factorially and the frequency of the lexicalized compounds was equated over the two conditions. The sentence frames prior to the target word were matched across conditions. Both lexical...

Previous studies have suggested that previews of words prior to fixation can be processed orthographically, but not semantically, during reading of sentences (K. Rayner, D. A. Balota, & A. Pollatsek, 1986). The present study tested whether semantic processing of previews can occur within words. The preview of the second constituent of 2-constituent Finnish compound nouns was manipulated. The pr...

Most machine translation systems construct translations from a closed vocabulary of target word forms, posing problems for translating into languages that have productive compounding processes. We present a simple and effective approach that deals with this problem in two phases. First, we build a classifier that identifies spans of the input text that can be translated into a single compound w...

In this paper we shall address the issue of the massive creation of complex words in Mandarin Chinese, a phenomenon which has led many linguists to regard Modern Chinese as a “language of compound words”. The issue of the massive creation of compound words in Chinese is parallel to another issue, that of the process of disyllabification of the preferred word-form in the historical development o...

German compound words pose special problems to statistical machine translation systems: the occurence of each of the components in the training data is not sufficient for successful translation. Even if the compound itself has been seen during training, the system may not be capable of translating it properly into two or more words. If German is the target language, the system might generate on...

The structure of lexical entries and the status of lexical decomposition remain controversial. In the psycholinguistic literature, one aspect of this debate concerns the psychological reality of the morphological complexity difference between compound words (teacup) and single words (crescent). The present study investigates morphological decomposition in compound words using visual lexical dec...

This study used grapheme-colour synaesthesia, a neurological condition where letters evoke a strong and consistent impression of colour, as a tool to investigate normal language processing. For two sets of compound words varying by lexical frequency (e.g., football vs lifevest) or semantic transparency (e.g., flagpole vs magpie), we asked 19 grapheme-colour synaesthetes to choose their dominant...