Meaning composition in the processing of transposed-constituent compound nonwords.

Abstract

Motivated by the compositional semantics perspective (Marelli, 2023), which regards the meaning-combination process as playing an important role in the recognition of polymorphemic words, the present study revisited a study by Crepaldi et al. (2013, Experiment 1) to reevaluate the role of semantic transparency in the processing of nonwords comprising existing morphemes. We replicated the transposed compound interference effect, namely, the greater difficulty in rejecting a nonword generated by reversing the order of the morpheme constituents (e.g., SIDELAKE from lakeside). Contrary to the claim of the original study, here we found evidence that this interference effect is greater if the original compound word was semantically transparent (e.g., lakeside) than opaque (e.g., hallmark). Importantly, we also show that this effect of baseword semantic transparency is in fact an effect of compositionality (the ease of generating a meaningful compound from the constituents). We discuss the implication of this finding for the processing of polymorphemic words, with particular regard to the experimental conditions that are favorable for finding a role for semantics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).