This text presents new work on the psycholinguistics & neurolinguistics of compound words & shows the insights offered on natural language processing & the relation between language, mind & memory.

This book presents new work on the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of compound words. It shows the insights this work offers on natural language processing and the relation between language, mind, and memory. Compounding is an easy and effective way to create and transfer meanings. By building new lexical items based on the meanings of existing items, compounds can usually be understood on first presentation, though - as, say, breadboard, cardboard, cupboard, and sandwich-board show - the rules governing the relations between the components' meanings are not always straightforward. Compound words are segmentable into their constituent morphemes in much the same way as sentences can be divided into their constituent words: children and adults would not otherwise find them interpretable. But compound sequences may also be independent lexical items that can be retrieved for production as single entities and whose idiosyncratic meanings are stored in the mind. Compound words reflect the properties both of linguistic representation in the mind and of grammatical processing. They thus offer opportunities for investigating key aspects of the mental operations involved in language: for example, the interplay between storage and computation; the manner in which morphological and semantic factors impact on the nature of storage; and the way the mind's computational processes serve on-line language comprehension and production. This book explores the nature of these opportunities, assesses what is known, and considers what may yet be discovered and how.

This book brings together current research findings on the involvement of word-internal structure for the purpose of word reading (especially morphological structure). The central theme of reading complex words is approached from several angles, such that the chapters span a wide variety of topics where this issue is important. It is a valuable resource for all researchers studying the mental lexicon and to those who teach advanced courses in the psychology of language.

The study of compounds is currently at the center of attention in many areas of both theoretical and applied linguistics. This volume brings together contributions by experts involved in a wide range of such areas, based on a large number of diverse languages ù spoken and signed. The fact that compound constructions are at the interface of the various components of language ù morphology, syntax, phonology, and semantics ù makes them ideal testing grounds for models of grammatical architecture, as seen in a number of these chapters. The breadth and depth of the coverage of topics, as well as the unified bibliography, make this volume a basic reference source for those interested in current theoretical as well as experimental approaches to compounding, and thus to theoretical linguists as well as psycholinguists and researchers in related fields of cognitive science.

This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework, gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars, and touching on a very wide range of topics, approaches, and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based, paradigmatic approach to morphology. The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes, from the further exploration of paradigms, to studies involving words, stems, and affixes, to examinations of competition, inheritance, and defaults, to investigations of morphomes, to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.

This book presents a comprehensive review of theoretical work on the linguistics and psycholinguistics of compound words and combines it with a series of surveys of compounding in a variety of languages from a wide range of language families. Compounding is an effective way to create and express new meanings. Compound words are segmentable into their constituents so that new items can often be understood on first presentation. However, as keystone, keynote, and keyboard, and breadboard, sandwich-board, and mortarboard show, the relation between components is often far from straightforward. The question then arises, as to how far compound sequences are analysed at each encounter and how far they are stored in the brain as single lexical items? The nature and processing of compounds thus offer an unusually direct route to how language operates in the mind, as well as providing the means of investigating important aspects of morphology, and lexical semantics, and insights to child language acquisition and the organization of the mental lexicon. This book is the first to report on the state of the art on these and other central topics, including the classification and typology of compounds, and cross-linguistic research on the subject in different frameworks and from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The XVI chapters of the handbook provide the reader, in both general articles and individual studies, with a wide variety of perspectives: word-formation as a linguistic discipline (history of science, theoretical concepts), units and processes in word-formation, rules and restrictions, semantics and pragmatics, foreign word-formation, language planning and purism, historical word-formation, word-formation in language acquisition and aphasia, word-formation and language use, tools in word-formation research. The final chapter comprises 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective. These portraits afford the first overview of this kind and will prove useful for future typological research. This handbook will provide an essential reference for both advanced students and researchers in word-formation and related fields within linguistics.

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.

Measurement and analysis of eye movements are two of the most powerful ways to study the workings of the human mind. This Special Issue on eye movements and information processing in reading presents an overview of experimental research based on this methodology. Eye movements provide a unique opportunity to examine principles of human information processing in a well-structured visual environment while people engage in a natural cognitive task. At the same time, oculomotor measures can be used as a tool to develop and test psycholinguistic hypotheses about the processing of written language. The papers in this issue contribute to both aspects, addressing issues that dominate current debates in the field. Seen from the angle of visual information processing, a major theme is the role played by parafoveal information for different types and levels of processing and for oculomotor control in reading. This includes effects of visual and linguistic word properties on the selection of words for fixation and the specification of saccade amplitudes. Clearly the most controversial question in this context concerns the allocation of attention, with positions ranging from a sequentially moving spotlight to a gradient of spatially distributed processing. Related to this is the issue of serial vs. parallel word processing and the fundamental question as to what extent the duration of fixations in reading is related to lexical processing. Taking a psycholinguistic perspective, the topics addressed include several levels of language processing from orthography to pragmatic information in sentence reading. New approaches to the study of morphologically complex words are reported, together with novel work revealing the complex nature of the apparently accessible, but elusive, concept of word frequency. Other papers reflect current theoretical discussions centered on the development of computational models of the reading process and contribute to the empirical base of these discussions. Taken together, this collection of papers, supplemented by an introduction to the field and a commentary on major issues, presents a comprehensive and up-to-date perspective on a research area currently characterised by numerous theoretical and empirical disputes. The papers will be of particular appeal to readers interested in basic and applied psycholinguistics, attention and visual perception, motor control and the modelling of complex cognitive processes.

This volume provides a broad overview of current work in aphasia in individuals who speak more than one language. With contributions from many of the leading researchers in the field, the material included, both experimental work and theoretical overviews, should prove useful to both researchers and clinicians. The book should also appeal to a broader audience, including all who have an interest in the study of language disorders in an increasingly multicultural/multilingual world (e.g. students of speech-language pathology and linguistics). The areas of multilingual aphasia addressed in this collection include assessment and treatment, language phenomena (e.g. code-switching), particular language pairs (including a bidialectal study), and the role of cultural context.