The nature of compounds: a psychocentric perspective.

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The nature of compounds: A psychocentric perspective Gary Libben

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Applied Linguistics & Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada Published online: 28 Feb 2014.

Click for updates To cite this article: Gary Libben (2014) The nature of compounds: A psychocentric perspective, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 31:1-2, 8-25, DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2013.874994 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2013.874994

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Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014 Vol. 31, Nos. 1 –2, 8– 25, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2013.874994

The nature of compounds: A psychocentric perspective Gary Libben

Downloaded by [National Sun Yat-Sen University] at 14:07 06 January 2015

Applied Linguistics & Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

Although compound words often seem to be words that themselves contain words, this paper argues that this is not the case for the vast majority of lexicalized compounds. Rather, it is claimed that as a result of acts of lexical processing, the constituents of compound words develop into new lexical representations. These representations are bound to specific morphological roles and positions (e.g., head, modifier) within a compound word. The development of these positionally bound compound constituents creates a rich network of lexical knowledge that facilitates compound processing and also creates some of the well-documented patterns in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic study of compounding. Keywords: Compounds; Morphology; Psycholinguistics; Neurolinguistics; Mental lexicon.

As is the case in many aspects of psycholinguistic inquiry, apparently simple phenomena and activities can sometimes turn out to be astonishingly complex, perplexing, and, if we are lucky, revealing of important aspects of human psychology. The representation and processing of compound words may be one of the best examples of this. Compound words appear to be very simple. Yet, the understanding of the mental and neurological correlates of their use can offer us privileged entry points to the properties of lexical processing and to human language in general.

COMPOUNDING IS BOTH PREVALENT AND PRODUCTIVE Perhaps the first reason that compounding is important is its straightforward prevalence as a word formation process over time and across

languages. Jackendoff (2002) has claimed that compounds may indeed be protolinguistic fossils from which more complex linguistic structures have developed. Dressler’s (2006) observation that the presence of affixation in a language entails the presence of compounding is consistent with this perspective. Thus, compound words are perhaps a universal human linguistic inheritance that form the foundation of lexical productivity (see Bauer, 2009). Synchronically, compounding tends to be extremely productive across languages. For speakers of languages such as German and Finnish (and even English), novel compounds are likely to be encountered on a daily basis. The productivity of compounding is considerably greater than that of other word formation processes (Baayen, 1992, 1994; Dressler, 2006). Because compounding has typically many fewer restrictions on which elements can participate in

Correspondence should be addressed to Gary Libben, Applied Linguistics & Psychology, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Avenue, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S3A1 (E-mail: [email protected]).

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the word formation process and which positions in a newly produced word these elements can occupy, it seems unlikely that a language can ever exhaust its lexical potential for compound productivity. The reason for this is that, even for the simplest of compounds (those with two constituents), the statistical opportunities produce staggeringly high levels of potential productivity. The potential productivity for two member compounds is defined as the number of permutations of n elements taken r at a time [i.e., n!/(n2r)!]. So, if a language possessed but 1000 monomorphemic nouns, and these could each serve as either compound heads or compound modifiers, those 1000 nouns could generate 1000!/(100022)! ¼ 998,000 distinct noun – noun compounds. The fact that compounds have such great potential productivity creates an opportunity to study patterns of lexical productivity and the psychological skills and processes associated with them. Compounding provides the ideal testing ground for this precisely because its elements are typically not positionally restricted. An element such as table, for example, can be the initial member of a compound, as in tabletop, or the final member, as in pool table. This underlines the way in which compounding, at least in principle, is almost completely unrestricted as a word formation process. Unlike prefixation and suffixation, compounding does not draw on a relatively small set of grammatically defined elements. As a result, some compound elements have very large morphological families (e.g., -berry, as discussed below). Some have morphological families with a few elements (e.g., -apple as the head of compounds such as pineapple, crabapple, and mayapple), and some nouns do not, at present, yet participate as the heads of any lexicalized English compounds (e.g., the potential compound head -papaya). It seems that patterns of coinage and productivity are correlated with the size of the morphological families and the semantic diversity within them. The family of -berry in English, for example, is both very large and very simple. Members of the family are types of berries. This semantic simplicity gives the initial compound constituent an essentially classificatory function

so that new members are easily accepted, and what might be termed semantic opacity is rarely noticed. Thus, whereas blueberry is more semantically transparent than raspberry, it may be the case that the semantic properties of the -berry family dampen the effect of this transparency difference. Consider as an example the relative acceptability of deerberry, deerfish, and deerduck. For most native speakers of English, these are likely to be of decreasing acceptability. Deerberry, the most acceptable, is in fact a type of berry. Deerfish seems to be somewhat acceptable (following the pattern of catfish and swordfish), and deerduck seems to be the least acceptable, perhaps because -duck in English does not have a substantial positional morphological family. As noted in Libben (2007), it is not only the heads of compounds that can have substantial morphological families. The fictional hero Batman has spawned a rather large set of compounds with the initial constituent bat-. These include his various forms of transportation (batmobile, batplane, batcycle) and various “tools of the trade” (e.g., batrope, batphone, batarang). As is indicated by the final example batarang (modelled after boomerang), the larger and semantically more inclusive the morphological family, the more accepting it is of new members. The examples above support an important observation made by Singh (2006). He noted that new compounds are quite rarely formed by simply bringing together lexemic elements. The much more frequent pattern is one in which coinage and therefore productivity results from the swapping of one element in a pattern of existing elements. This coinage tendency results in increasingly larger positional morphological families. As a final note regarding compound productivity, it is important to consider that compounding also allows for the creation of balanced pairings (e.g., singer-songwriter), which create a blended concept or a superordinate one (as in the Chinese compound for parent, composed of the morphemes mother and father). These types of compounds appear to be rarer across the world’s languages but not absent in languages such as Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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English (Olsen, 2012). It is interesting to note that precisely these kinds of compounds were considered to be purest form of compounding by early Sanskrit grammarians. This apparently was well known by the time that the Bhagavad Gita was committed to written form. It finds expression in the statement of Krishna describing himself as: “Of flowers, I am the rose. Of the alphabet, I am the letter ‘A’. Of compounds, I am the dual.” If we include the capacity of dual compounds to create blended and superordinate concepts, compounding seems to allow for a full range of sematic and syntactic productivity. The productivity of compounding places it at the interface of storage, semantics, and syntax. And, as elements with two or more lexemic components, compounds have just the right amount of complexity to allow us to probe many of the defining semantic and syntactic characteristics of human language systems.

HOW CAN COMPOUNDS BE DEFINED? Before we move to the key questions related to the representation and processing of compound words in the mind, it is important to note that defining compound words is not as straightforward as it might seem. Common dictionary definitions include: “a word made up of two or more existing words” (Oxford Dictionaries Online) or “a word consisting of components that are words” (Merriam Webster Online). These definitions are consistent with the Latin origins of the term compound (componere “to put together”) and appear to adequately describe the prototypical English cases such as blueberry, bedbug, and mouse pad. However, the definitions do not easily capture other compounds such as boysenberry, humbug, and helicopter pad. If compounding required that constituents be real words of the language, then boysen would certainly not qualify (a boysenberry is a hybrid named for its original developer, Rudolf Boysen). The word humbug has a number of interesting etymologies, placing its origins in Middle English, Irish, Icelandic, Swedish, German, Tagalog, and Italian. None of these

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proposed origins involves the expected English words hum and bug. Finally, the case of helicopter pad reminds us that compounds in English need not be limited to bimorphemic constructions and that compound words such as helicopter need not derive from independent words. In fact, both heli and copter as free forms in English are formed from helicopter, which itself is formed from neither heli nor copter, but rather the Greek lexemes helix (helix) and pter (wing). As would be expected, the English dictionary definitions above also do not address the complexities of compounding that are evident in other languages (e.g., Greek) in which roots or stems, rather than words, are the lexemic constituents. These are quite rare in English, although compounds such as pant leg and trouser leg demonstrate some comparability (only pants and trousers, but not pant and trouser can exist as free-standing English words). In addition, English definitions do not take into consideration complexities of interfixation (grammatical morphemes between the lexical constituents of compounds) that are evident in languages such as Polish, Greek, Dutch, and German (e.g., Jarema, Busson, Nikolova, Tsapkini, & Libben, 1999; Krott et al., 2004). It seems clear that the definition of compound words as words that themselves contain words is inadequate. This leads us to the more technical morphological literature in which, for example, Lieber and Sˇtekauer (2009) contrast a number of compound definitions. Within their survey, the approach of Bauer (2003), which treats compounds as composed of two or more lexemes, stands out as providing an umbrella sufficiently broad to include roots, stems, and words as constituents, but narrow enough to exclude affixes as major compound constituents. This is the working definition that we employ throughout the next sections.

WHAT MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS CORRESPOND TO COMPOUND WORDS? In the sections above, our focus has been very much on compounds as lexical, and not necessarily



psychological, structures. As we move now from one domain to the next, it is important to question the extent to which it might be meaningful to import definitions associated with compounding as a word formation process into the psychological domain of mental representation. In the psycholinguistic study of compound processing, we typically employ the technical vocabulary of linguistic description to refer to mental representations associated with linguistic structures such as words, phrases, or sentences. In the sections below, I continue to use much of the vocabulary of descriptive linguistics to refer to their psychological and ultimately neurological correlates. This is essentially a matter of convenience and tradition and is much the same as using expressions such as “the sun rises” and “the sun sets”, despite the fact that we know that, from a heliocentric perspective, it is actually the Earth that rises and sets. We casually speak of words being represented in the mind. These are useful metaphoric formulations even if it turns out that we will never actually find that words are represented in any dictionary-like form in the brain. The metaphoric formulations are useful in that they allow us to state and test our ideas using reasonably wellunderstood and shared constructs and, in so doing, develop our understanding. Our understanding of how compound words may be represented in the mind is an excellent example of such development. There now seems to be little doubt that the mental representation of compound words requires the equivalent of whole word representation as well as representations of their constituent lexemes. In this way, we have departed considerably from some of the early motivations for the psycholinguistic investigation of compound processing in the 1970s and 1980s. In the seminal work of Taft and Forster (1976), it was claimed that the processing of compound words involved a “prelexical” decomposition of compound input strings into their constituent morphemes, which then became the units of access. It was at least logically possible within this approach that compound words would be represented solely in terms of their

constituents. If this were indeed the way in which compound words were represented in the mind, this would create the need to decompose and recompose even the most common compound words each time they are perceived and produced. It would seem that such a system would have very few advantages in terms of computational efficiency. It would, however, have substantial advantages in terms of storage efficiency. As we have seen in our discussion of the potential for productivity above, a relatively small number of individual lexemes can produce a very large number of compound words. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that compounds do have whole word representations. This does not, in itself, contradict the actual claims made by Taft and Forster (1976) with respect to obligatory prelexical decomposition (see Semenza & Mondini, 2010, for a review of issues of morphological decomposition in compounding). It does, however, cast doubt upon whether it is appropriate to invoke the theme of efficiency as an evaluation criterion for the adequacy of mental organizations. Libben (2006) claims that the maximization of efficiency is not what the lexical processing system is designed to achieve. Rather, it is designed to achieve the maximization of opportunity for activation, and specifically for meaning activation. Having the system engage in prelexical decomposition, postlexical decomposition, constituent access, and whole word access has substantial meaning activation advantages. These easily outweigh the efficiency disadvantages, the importance of which were perhaps dubious in the first place. Ultimately, the task of our language processing system is to allow us to read each other’s minds across the interpersonal chasm of sound waves or printed characters. This is a formidable task, which requires that no opportunity to capture the subtlety of lexical and morphological patterning remain unutilized. Both the extreme positions on how compound words could be represented in the mind fail to maximize opportunity for meaning creation. Full decomposition would maximize storage efficiency. Full unstructured representation would maximize computational Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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efficiency. However, the configuration that has received the most experimental support is one that requires decomposition, whole word listing, and internal morphological structuring of compounds. This configuration is, of course, the least efficient of all. Removing the notion of efficiency as an evaluation criterion for hypotheses concerning the mental representations of multimorphemic words is quite liberating. This is not to say that the notion of efficiency has no psycholinguistic relevance. This remains to be seen. At this point, however, our problem is that we are constrained to calibrate efficiency over models that are at best, as we have claimed above, useful metaphors for the mental representation of words in the mind and with constructs such as words, morpheme, and so on that we know we are using as a matter of convenience. Thus, what might appear to be inefficient with respect to those constructs and metaphors may turn out to be rather more efficient as our understanding more closely approximates the actual instantiation of lexical knowledge in the mind. If it is indeed appropriate to free ourselves from the potentially blinkering effects of using efficiency to think about the configuration of multimorphemic words and indeed about the mental lexicon, it is perhaps appropriate to also be wary of the potentially blinkering effects of the notion of representation itself. The notion of lexical representation in the mind evokes a static image of words as mental lists or members of a mental dictionary in the mind (Aitchison, 1987). Here too the images borrowed from the world of language description have the potential to lure us into the reification of metaphors such as word, compound, or even mental lexicon. Thus, in choosing the title for this section, I tried to signal the problem of the potential reification of our metaphors by choosing the question: “What mental representations correspond to compound words?” as the title, rather than a more traditional formulation such as: “How are compound words represented in the mind?”. Such a traditional formulation carries with it an implicit perspective on lexical

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representation that is potentially problematic. It seems to assign primary reality to compound words as entities that exist outside the mind. Presumably, as a result of particular patterns of acquisition and use, these representations end up “inside the mind” and are then activated for the purposes of language production and comprehension. It seems to me worthwhile to stress that language entities and certainly notions of language structure (as in the notion of compound word) most likely exist outside of human minds only as convenient abstractions and that their fundamental reality is psychological in nature (Derwing, 1973). At this point in the development of psycholinguistic theory, this is not a particularly controversial claim. Yet, it is, I think, important to bear in mind when we try to imagine the potential reality that underlies our mental representations for words, their internal structures, and their connections to one another in the store of knowledge that we commonly refer to as the mental lexicon. The relationship between words as knowledge representations that exist inside the minds of speakers of a language and words that exist outside of those minds, say as written stimuli in psycholinguistic experiments, present us with some interesting conceptual problems. These problems have the potential to bring to the foreground some of the challenges associated with understanding the mental representations that may correspond to compound words. Consider, as an example, a common approach that a researcher might take to describing the procedure in an experiment in which compound words are presented on a computer screen to a participant. The description of the procedure would probably contain just the kinds of expression that I have used above (e.g., compound words were presented in the centre of a computer screen for N milliseconds). Yet, a more accurate rendering of what we might mean by such a procedural description is that participants were presented with visual stimuli that we expect to be able to activate mental representations and evoke meanings corresponding to what we call compound words.



If the procedural description above is indeed an accurate rendering of what we mean, then it is because it foregrounds the claim that compound words, like all lexical structures, are essentially psychocentric constructs. One of the consequences of a psychocentric approach to compound representation in the mind, and one that may have key neuropsychological consequences, is the way that it potentially changes how we look at the stimulus presentation event in its entirety: In a traditional lingua-centric framework, participants are presented with a common set of stimuli, to which they sometimes produce different responses. In a psychocentric framework, they can be said to have received different stimuli. This is perhaps the core characteristic of the psychocentric approach.

MORPHOLOGICAL TRANSCENDENCE AS A HYPOTHESIS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF COMPOUND MORPHOLOGY IN THE MIND The discussion above of the mental states that may correspond to compound words points out that it is useful to conceive of common notions such as compound word from a psychocentric perspective. This presents us with the challenge of trying to capture, with the terminological tools available to us, the kinds of internal mental states that may indeed correspond to descriptions of compound words in general and the variants that may correspond to semantic and morphological characteristics in the minds of speakers of a language. In Libben (2010), the hypothesis of morphological transcendence is presented as an example of how the processes of language production and comprehension shape mental states that correspond to what we commonly call compound words. The notion of morphological transcendence draws from the linguistic and psycholinguistic properties of compound words discussed above. It begins with the assumption that compound words are typically found in positionally defined

morphological families. So, although balanced compounds such as singer-songwriter exist, the much more common pattern is folk singer or opera singer, to which new constructions such as rock singer get attached. The morphological transcendence hypothesis claims that as a result of the processes of language comprehension and production, the mental representation for compound constituents develops from the independent lexemes (often independent words) that corresponded to their original forms. The independent lexemes become partially grammaticized and positionally bound compound constituents. Thus, we would expect that most native speakers of English, as a result of their frequent experience in producing and comprehending words such as blueberry and strawberry, develop a new partially grammaticized lexical element that we can describe as -berry. Here the hyphen points to the manner in which the element -berry is positionally bound within a compound. It does, of course, correspond in meaning to the whole word berry from which it arose. Nevertheless, as a result of morphological transcendence, the word berry can be said to have developed a new variant. And as a result of language use, that variant has the capacity to drift from its origins both semantically and grammatically. The compound modifier bat- described above is another example of this. The hypothesis of morphological transcendence assumes, of course, that representational efficiency is not an important design consideration in the development of effective mental functional architectures for the representation of compounds. Indeed, it has the effect of at least doubling the amount of representation required. In addition, the hypothesis of morphological transcendence directly contradicts the core elements of the common dictionary definitions of compound words—namely, that they are multimorphemic words that themselves contain two or more words. The consequences of conceiving of the representation of compound words in the mind in terms of morphological transcendence are represented schematically in Figure 1. In this figure, possible representations for the compounds roomkey, keyboard, and boardroom are depicted. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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Figure 1. Morphological transcendence creates a large number of links that would characterize the representations of compounds such as roomkey, keyboard, and boardroom in the mind.

The process of morphological transcendence is shown as having created positionally bound constituents for each compound. This means that the constituent key-, in the compound modifier position, differs from the word key. It also means that key- differs from the constituent -key, which is in compound head position. This, of course creates a proliferation of morphological entities. It also, however, allows for a rich network of relations among compound elements and among compound words. This network of relations may provide a means by which we can conceptualize the dynamic nature of compound

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representations. As lexemes are used more often in compounds, they develop morphologically transcended variants. These variants foster productivity and the development of positionally defined families of semantic relations. Members of such families coactivate each other. In Figure 1, there is also a representation of a mechanism by which patterns of use within compounds can affect the representations of lexemes as independent words. In the figure, the original lexemic forms create the bridge between the representations of compound constituents in modifier and head positions. Whether empirical evidence



exists that is consistent with this view of words as mediators between their modifier and head variants awaits further experimental investigation. The representations in Figure 1 seem to have the potential to provide a framework within which to understand a number of compound processing effects. The first of these is the asymmetry between initial and final compound constituents. To a large extent, this asymmetry falls out from the patterns of compound word formation that have been discussed above. New compound words rarely are formed de novo from two independent words. Rather, they are created through a process of partial analogy in which one element of an existing compound is exchanged. This plays a large role in creating the compound semantic families that have been discussed above. Broadly speaking, there is more chance that the semantic relations between compound heads and their corresponding free words will remain strong. Related to this is the greater tendency for there to be fewer semantically opaque compound constituents in head position than in modifier position. As a result, English compounds such as jailbird, in which the first constituent is semantically transparent but the final is semantically opaque, are less common than compounds such as nickname, in which the first constituent is semantically opaque, and the final constituent is semantically transparent. The differences in the ways modifiers and heads are related to their corresponding free-standing words is likely also to be related to the fact that, by definition, compound heads of endocentric compounds share the grammatical features and probably many of the semantic characteristics of their corresponding free words. Thus address books, pocket books, and notebooks are all types of books. And, even though a MacBook is not, if its use did not activate the requisite grammatical and semantic characteristics of book, the product name would be much less effective. In a comparative study of the processing of Hebrew and English compounds, Goral, Libben, Baayen, and Jarema (2009) and Goral, Libben, and Baayen (2012) report that words corresponding to modifier constituents, when presented as primes in a lexical

decision task, show evidence of competition between modifier constituents and their corresponding whole words. Head constituents, however, do not show this competition. An important feature of this study is that the effects were found for both Hebrew and English. In Hebrew, compounds are formed with the head as the initial constituent. In English, compounding is head-final. Thus, for example, the Hebrew word for goldfish is also composed of the constituents fish and gold, but in the opposite order. The types of representations shown in Figure 1 may also provide a framework within which to think about the effects of semantic relations among compound constituents that have been highlighted by Gagne´ and colleagues (e.g., Gagne´ & Spalding, 2007, 2009). The postulation of positionally bound and grammaticized compound constituents that are distinct from the whole words from which they originated provides a way to consider how semantic relations may in fact be constituted as positionally bound constituent families. The formation of these families, including the semantic relations between modifiers and heads, could also have their genesis in the substitution approach to compound word formation discussed above. The massive compound interconnectivity and the specificity of compound constituent roles shown in Figure 1 naturally suggests that compounds as a type of morphological structure may be subject to coactivation. Under the morphological transcendence hypothesis, it is primarily the hyphenated constituents such as -key and keythat are activated in compound processing, and only secondarily, as a result of spreading activation, the whole word key. This creates the conditions under which the competition between modifiers and whole words noted in Goral et al. (2012), Marelli, Crepaldi, and Luzzatti (2009) and Marelli and Luzzatti (2012) can take place. Such competition would be particularly strong in a constituent priming paradigm, which, within the morphological transcendence framework, is probably misnamed. The reason for this is that in this paradigm, the initial presentation of the prime (usually centred on the computer screen) is actually Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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a whole word presentation, not a compound constituent presentation. It is perhaps for this reason, that we see interference effects in priming paradigms. In cases where there is no priming, it seems reasonable within this approach to expect that we will nevertheless see effects of competition in which the higher the frequency of the nonhead constituent as a whole word, the greater the interference. Presumably, this results from activation that leads from the positionally bound constituent to the whole word. Modifiers will have, on average, more points of noncorrespondence than morphological heads and thus produce greater interference as a result of activation. The higher the frequency of the word, the greater its activation, and thus the greater its potential for support or interference. Another possible consequence of compounds as a type of morphological structure being subject to coactivation is the phenomenon known as the compound effect (Semenza & Mondini, 2010). The compound effect refers to cases in which research participants with aphasia who are unable to access the form of a target compound will nevertheless retain knowledge that the target form is a compound. In production tasks, another compound word is often substituted for the target compound (Semenza et al., 2011; Semenza, Luzzatti, & Carabelli, 1997). Within the present approach, the compound effect can be seen as resulting from the links that morphologically transcended constituents (simply by virtue of having developed into positionally defined grammaticized elements) create among the class of compounds as a whole. If we assume that the compound effect has its source in the partial (but of course, not fully successful) activation of compound elements, then the compound effect seems to fall out naturally from morphological transcendence. Under this view, the effect is not the result of any metalinguistic knowledge that the target was a compound word, but rather simply the result of the implicit cue that at least one transcended compound constituent received (at least partial) activation. I suggest that this alone may be sufficient to generate the observation that compound targets are replaced by other compound words.

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The perspective also provides a natural account for why compound elements can be substituted in aphasia. If we assume a general template of beginning-to-end processing of compound words (as originally claimed by Taft & Forster, 1976) and add the dimension of morphological transcendence (i.e., assume that it is really the initial constituent qua positionally bound constituent that is activated as compounds are processed), then the constituent substitution observed in aphasia should be morphologically constrained (modifiers replacing modifiers, heads replacing heads). It should also be the case that head-initial compounds are more vulnerable to substitution than head-final compounds (in languages such as Italian, which possess head-initial compounding). The reason that this prediction falls out from morphological transcendence goes back to the observation of Singh (2006) that new compounds are formed (and rendered comprehensible) because language users have access to morphological compound families. This access enables substitution of one element (usually the modifier) to create a new compound family member. It also perhaps gives rise to the interference effects that may be at the core of the compound effect. This perspective suggests that the compound effect is not simply about the partial retention of morphological knowledge in the face of impaired lexical access. Rather, it is a demonstration of how morphological knowledge may interact with the reduced ability to deactivate mental representations that have been created through morphological transcendence and that are activated through the normal processes of compound word recognition. Indeed, under this view, the compound effect observed in aphasia can be seen as a specific manifestation of the blocking effects that nonaphasic language users experience during conditions of tip-of-the-tongue word finding difficulties. The observations above and the postulation of morphologically transcended positionally bound compound constituents as the result of compound processing over the lifetime may also explain the apparently counterintuitive finding that persons with aphasia tend to not make the errors in compounds that we might expect them to.



Specifically, persons with aphasia tend to preserve the order of constituents within compounds and not to switch them. Such switching would be expected under the view that compound processing involves automatic and obligatory decomposition of compound words and that the result of that decomposition is the activation of individual words. If, on the other hand, it is positionally bound constituents that are activated as a result of the automatic and obligatory processes of decomposition, such switching would not be expected. The available data to date suggest that constituent order switching does not occur as a common error in the production of compounds by persons with aphasia (Hittmair-Delazer, Andree, Semenza, De Bleser, & Benke, 1994). The Hittmair-Delazer et al. (1994) study of aphasia in German is supported by the findings of Dressler et al. (2012) who found very few ordering errors in the production of German compounds by four persons with aphasia (see also Badecker’s, 2001, extensive case study of compound production by an English-speaking participant with aphasia). The nature of the task that they employed was noteworthy in that participants were presented with individual words, arranged one above the other on cards. From these words, the aphasic participants were asked to create compounds. The error rate for nonreversible compounds was 14%. In addition, for both reversible compounds (e.g., houseboat and boathouse) and nonreversible compounds, participants retained knowledge of the correct interfix to be used. Interfixation in German is rather complex. Most German compounds are uninterfixed, simply combining the major lexical constituents. However, about 35% require the presence of a grammatical morpheme between the constituents. German has at least four patterns of such interfixes. So, a high error rate among participants with aphasia might be expected. However, participants showed a less than 3.5% interfix substitution rate and a 16.5% interfix omission rate. Thus, the correct interfix was supplied in approximately 80% of the compound productions. This high success rate is not consistent with a view that

participants are employing independent words to form compounds. It is much more consistent with the view that they are recomposing dedicated compound constituents with dedicated interfixation patterns (see also Libben, Jarema, Dressler, Stark, & Pos, 2002). It may also be the case that Figure 1 provides a useful framework within which to interpret the failure of deactivation phenomena among persons with aphasia reported by Libben (1998) and Libben, Buchanan, and Colangelo (2004). If, indeed, activating a compound word also entails activating links to its elements as morphological constituents and as whole words, then part of the process of compound comprehension will involve deactivation of the whole word meanings of these constituents. Libben (1998) reported the case of a person with aphasia whose paraphrases of compound stimuli showed evidence of the blending of compound and constituent semantics and a failure of deactivation. For example, the compound flashlight was paraphrased as “You can put it in your pocket and it flashes”. This paraphrase shows a miscomprehension that seems to result from the blending of the whole word meaning (a flashlight is a small portable light that often can indeed fit in somebody’s pocket) and the whole-word meaning of the constituent flash. Similar patterns of paraphrase can be seen in examples such as greenhorn being paraphrased as “a new cow horn”, and pancake being paraphrased as “a cake in a pan for breakfast”. Finally, in this section, it is appropriate to consider matters of semantic transparency in the context of morphological transcendence. A good deal of research on the representation of compounds in the mind has employed the distinction between semantically transparent and opaque compounds to probe the manner in which semantic properties of complex lexical items impact their structural representation in the mind and the manner in which they are accessed in word recognition and production tasks. A number of studies have investigated whether, for example, the compound effect discussed above is found with both semantically transparent and opaque compounds (e.g., Blanken, 2000; Mondini, Luzzatti, Zonca, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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Pistarini, & Semenza, 2004). The findings that both opaque and transparent compounds show the compound effect has been taken as evidence that both types of compounds undergo morphological decomposition. Taken together, the evidence on the role of semantic transparency in the representation of compound words in the mind suggests, apparently paradoxically, both that semantic transparency is a robust factor in single word processing (but see Pollatsek & Hyo¨na¨, 2005) and that it does not distinguish between those compounds that are decomposed and those that are not. It is possible that this apparent paradox dissolves when we view issues of semantic transparency from the perspective of morphological transcendence (Libben & Weber, in press). Morphological transcendence creates dedicated compound constituents. Their psychocentric status as constituents is not dependent on their semantic relations to their corresponding whole words. So, there is every reason to expect that both semantically transparent and opaque compounds will be decomposed in lexical processing. Yet, the role that the constituents play in relation to other members of their positional morphological families can be important in lexical processing. Thus, although boysenberry is semantically opaque in that the meaning of the whole word cannot easily be predicted from the meanings of its parts, it is not semantically anomalous within the family of -berry compounds. In contrast, a compound such as humbug is semantically opaque and semantically anomalous in that the meaning of the compound is not predictable from the meanings of its parts, and the compound does not fall within any compound family for humor for -bug. Finally, it is important to note that, from this perspective, it is very often the process of morphological transcendence itself that creates the most common patterns of semantic opacity in compounding. As words that were initially substituted for compound constituents join a compound family, they begin, through use, to acquire morphologically transcended properties. The meaning of the constituent may drift from the meaning of the original word. It may also acquire, as a result of its positional boundedness,

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specific properties depending on whether it joined a compound family in the modifier or in the head position. A brief account of the coinage of the compound boysenberry may serve as an illustrative example. In the 1920s, Walter Knott found the berry vines first developed by Rudolf Boisen on Boisen’s abandoned farm in northern California. Knott transplanted the vines to his own farm in southern California and developed them commercially. To credit their developer, he called them boysenberries. Boysenberries became the cornerstone of a business that developed from a small berry farm and fruit stand in the 1930s to a theme park that attracts millions of visitors per year. The park, Knott’s Berry Farm, is pronounced with the typical stress patterns of a left branching English compound—that is, [Knottsberry] farm. Thus, this too has become a semantically opaque compound as a result of the switching of berry- to -berry. As the modifier of the compound berry farm, function of berry- would be relatively transparent semantically. However, as the head of the compound Knottsberry, it loses its semantic function and becomes a member of an entirely different morphological positional family within the compound construction. Specifically, it joins the family of other place names and family names ending in -berry (e.g., Mayberry, where -berry derives from the root for castle). As the examples above illustrate, an understanding of patterns of semantic transparency and the consequences for normal and impaired language processing requires that we do not see compound constituents simply as free words embedded within compounds. Rather, it requires that we consider compound constituents as morphologically transcended elements that are positionally bound and participate in semantically and morphologically defined semantic families. The overall degree of semantic transparency that we intuitively ascribe to a compound word results from the interaction of at least two factors: (a) the semantic correspondence to the meaning of its constituents to their original free word counterparts and (b) the extent to which the meanings of the constituents pattern semantically with other



members of the positional morphological families. Under this view, bedroom is a perfectly transparent compound. In it, the constituent bed- means bed, and the constituent -room means room. Moreover, the initial constituent patterns well with other compounds such as bedframe, bedcover, bedbug, and the final constituent patterns well semantically with compounds such as dining room, boardroom, and bathroom.

HOW CAN PSYCHOCENTRIC NOTIONS OF COMPOUND REPRESENTATIONS BE MODELLED? This discussion of the nature of compound representation in the mind began with a discussion of the challenges and potential pitfalls associated with employing a toolbox of lingua-centric terms and constructs in order to gain insight into the nature of mental lexical representations. As has been mentioned above, it is possible that the notion of representation itself, as a static and welldefined item of knowledge, may be the greatest stumbling block to the creation of appropriately psychocentric models of lexical knowledge. In the model of compound representation shown in Figure 1, there are a number of conventions that are employed that are designed to constitute testable claims about the nature of compound words in the mind. But, it is important to note, that this does not constitute a claim, for example, that the hyphen (-), as a marker of the positional boundedness of compound constituents is “psychologically real”. Rather, it is a convention intended to signify that some knowledge, corresponding to positional boundedness, is part of the cognitive system of language users. And, the same holds true for the boxes in the figure, the connections, and the thickness of those connections, and so on. These conventions perform much the same function as the written words within them perform. Although writing now seems to us to be a core component of language, it has its origins, of course, as a technological innovation designed to solve a problem—the fleeting nature of speech. The technological

solution was successful to the extent to which it allowed a reader to reproduce, with reasonable accuracy, the original fleeting events. A secondary consequence of this technological innovation was that by providing static images of fleeting dynamic events, it created new opportunities to reflect upon language and to gain insight into its structure. In many ways, our models of language representation, if successful, perform the same functions. We wish them to create new opportunities to reflect upon language and to gain insight into its structure. A successful model of representation must also be at least consistent with our best understanding of the fleeting language events in communicative activities. For it is these that we ultimately desire to model. The perspectives that we have inherited in the fields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics have perhaps created a bias toward models in which words are represented in the mind as static representations. The metaphor of the mental lexicon as a dictionary in the mind has undoubtedly contributed to this bias. And, the bias has been supported by the notion of “word” as memory trace. These notions lead naturally to views of words in the brain in some representational form corresponding to letters or phonemes. But, it remains possible that the actual representations of words, compounds, and positionally defined compound constituents (i.e., all the elements in Figure 1) do not resemble our lingua-centric representations at all. Bearing the above in mind, Figures 2 and 3 display a type of representation for morphological transcendence that may capture the considerations that have been expressed above. The representations allow us to consider morphological transcendence as creating new lexemic representations that behave as three separate grammatically defined lexemic structures. On the other hand, they can also be seen as three faces of a morphologically transcended configuration. Indeed, it is this morphological transcendence that may have served as the fundamental psychocentric process that enabled compounding to be the pivotal role in lexical productivity across language and perhaps language evolution in general. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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Figure 2. The initial stages of morphological transcendence. The whole words at the bottom of the triangle have the potential to create two compound constituents. Here the fact that in English, bat more commonly becomes a modifier than a head, and berry more commonly becomes a head than a modifier is shown by the darkness of the constituent representations.

As a terminological note, it is important at this point to acknowledge that the terms modifier and head that are used in Figure 1 and throughout this discussion are not universally applicable. They are preferable to terms such as first constituent and second constituent, because many languages are head-initial rather than head-final. But, of course, even in languages such as English, which are headfinal, it is not universally the case that the constituent that we call the head functions in that way semantically. Similarly, it is not universally the case that the constituent that we call the modifier has a semantic modification role. In Figure 2, we see how morphological transcendence may first begin. The development for particular lexemes is unlikely to be balanced. A word such as berry will give rise to a family of -berry compounds as we have seen. Similarly, bat will give rise to a family of bat- compounds. As this latter example demonstrates, the conditions under which this occurs is very specific to a lexical item and a set of culturally and historically embedded coinage conditions that are also very specific (and therefore difficult to predict).

Thus, the representations in Figure 2 show the potential for both head and modifier transcendence, but the imbalance that characterizes actual examples. In Figure 3, the next stages of transcendence are depicted, using the lexemic elements, board, key, and room that comprised the core of the representations shown in Figure 1. The most important difference between Figures 2 and 3 is that in the latter, the arrows connecting words and their morphological constituent representations are bidirectional. This represents the hypothesis that as positional structures become more frequent, their sematic properties spread back to their corresponding whole words. The representations in Figure 3 also instantiate two hypotheses expressed above. These are that compound constituents are linked through their whole word representations and that compound heads are linked in a more facilitatory manner to their corresponding whole word representations than modifier representations. The former hypothesis is instantiated through the presence of bidirectional word – constituent connections and the absence of direct modifier – head connections. This is intended to capture, for example, the observation that the modifier key- can have a metaphoric use in compounds such as keystone, keynote, and so on, but that the head -key does not presently participate in this metaphoric extension. The word key, however, does participate in the metaphor (e.g., This is a key point). The second hypothesis—that heads and modifiers are linked differently to their corresponding whole word representations—is shown in Figure 3 through the difference between the dotted line linking modifiers and words and solid lines

Figure 3. Bidirectional links in later stages of morphological transcendence.

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linking heads and words. It is important to note that although, on average, we expect there to be a head–modifier imbalance, the actual balance is likely to be specific to individual compounds. Indeed, the weight and valence of these connections could characterize much of the semantic variety that we see in compounding. The English compound redhead, for example, is often classified as exocentric. An alternative representation is to consider it as simply having stronger modifier connections than head connections. Whether more finegrained specifications than this are required to capture the mental representations of such words is an empirical question. Seen in this way, the actual balance between modifier – word and head – word connections will be specific to individual lexemes and individual people. Therefore, the imbalance across the system, shown in Figure 1, must be viewed as a type of abstraction that captures overall asymmetries in classes of stimuli. Like many such abstractions, it seems much more to describe behavioural tendencies than to drive them.

MAXIMIZATION OF OPPORTUNITY, TRANSCENDENCE, AND MORPHOLOGICAL SUPERSTATES The triangular representations of morphological transcendence that we have been employing allow us to consider the manner in which psychocentric metaphors for compound representation may differ from those that can be described as lingua-centric. The first and most obvious point of difference is that the psychocentric metaphors that we have been using are assumed to be

Figure 4. The compound keyboard. Representations against the white background are those that are interpreted as constituents.

dynamic, developing and changing over time. The second main point of differentiation is that the triangular networks that we have been employing are morphological in nature, but cannot strictly be defined as morphemes. Thus, using them to describe actual compounds results in diagrams such as the one representing the compound keyboard in Figure 4. In Figure 5, the ability of the psychocentric representations to capture morphological ambiguity is depicted. The representation is designed to capture the fact that a novel triconstituent compound such as coffee table lamp is potentially ambiguous. Although most readers of English will have a left-branching reading for this compound—that is, [coffee- -table]-[-lamp]—some will assign it a right-branching interpretation. The diagram in Figure 5 is designed to represent the claim that psychocentric morphological representations need not have a single morphological interpretation or structure. One of the consequences of morphological transcendence is that it can capture what appears to be morphological structure by simply recording which transcended constituents (head or modifier) are activated in a particular position (as in Figure 4). In Figure 5, we see that, additionally, morphological ambiguity

Figure 5. An ambiguous English triconstituent compound. The activation of both modifier and head variants in the medial position places the compound in a morphological superstate. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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can be represented by indicating the activation of both head and modifier variants in a particular position. Such a compound cannot be said to have a particular morphological structure. Rather, it is best described as being in a morphological superstate. This superstate is typically easily resolved when the compound is used in a particular conceptual and sentential context.

NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS: COMPOUND WORDS, THE MAXIMIZATION OF OPPORTUNITY, AND THE INTERPERSONAL CHASM This paper has focused on the nature of compound words from a psychocentric perspective. The discussion began with the observation that compound words are extremely common across the world’s languages and that they very often form the backbone of lexical productivity in a language. A key feature of compounding is that it allows nondedicated lexemes to serve as compound constituents, often in both modifier and head position, and often across all lexical categories. Thus, in English, for example, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions can all participate in compounding. In this discussion, I have concentrated on noun –noun compounds. It is important to note that noun – noun compounds are likely (at least in principle) to be the least constrained of all compound types in terms of their meanings and the semantic roles of their constituents. Badecker (2001) offers the comparison of the English noun –noun compounds fertility pill, nausea pill, garlic pill, and horse pill. All of these compounds can be said to be relatively transparent. However, closer inspection reveals that all the modifiers differ in their semantic relations to their morphological head pill. So, for example, whereas a fertility pill is a pill for fertility, a nausea pill is a pill against nausea. As has been noted above, understanding the role of such semantic relations in online compound processing has been the subject of considerable research by Gagne´ and Spalding (e.g., Gagne´ & Spalding 2007, 2009).

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These observations concerning the relational diversity and the overall semantic freedom of constituents in noun– noun compounds suggest that noun –noun compounds can be semantically transparent only retrospectively. In other words, once the meaning of the overall compound is known, then some noun –noun compounds seem transparent because the semantic contribution of the constituents are relatively clear. It seems, however, extremely rare that we can say that the meaning of a compound is determined by the meanings of its constituents. At best, constituent semantics enable good guesses at the whole word meaning. And, it seems that the probability that such guesses will be accurate is enhanced by the confluence of at least two key factors: First and foremost, that the constituents need to be transcended constituents with substantial morphological families for their respective compound positions. Second, the meanings and semantic roles of the constituents need to accord with the majority of constituents within their families. It is important to underline the claim that from a psychocentric perspective, considerations above of what might constitute optimal compound types are really a shorthand for claims about what might constitute optimal cognitive and ultimately neuropsychological functional organizations for compound processing. Thus, morphological transcendence is essentially a psychological process. It derives from an individual’s experience with both understanding and producing compounds. I have claimed that many of the properties of morphological transcendence help us to understand observed phenomena among persons with aphasia. The ways in which even partial activation of a compound constituent can activate families of compounds may be a driving force in the compound effect observed by many researchers. The reason for this is that activation of a transcended compound constituent constitutes a cue to compound structure. This is comparable to the manner in which the activation of the -ed marker of past tense in English constitutes evidence that the element to which it attaches must be a verb.



I also claim that the postulation of dedicated positionally bound constituents can explain why compound constituents are reversed less often in aphasia than might be expected and why compound interfixes, in languages that have them, are typically preserved. Within the morphological transcendence framework, compound interfixes are part of modifier representations. The hypothesis of morphological transcendence offers a particular perspective on compound processing and its impairment in persons with aphasia. It claims that morphological transcendence brings with it morphological proliferation. Thus, what are traditionally seen as single words are now seen as configurations of lexemic triplets. These have properties of individual lexemes and also properties that make them three faces of lexemic networks. In both cases, compound processing will involve activation of compound representations, but also deactivation of potentially competing whole word representations. Thus, as discussed above, morphological transcendence predicts that the challenges that persons with aphasia have in processing compounds can come from a failure of deactivation. It might be worthwhile at this point to consider how we may best move, at least tentatively, to the next level of scientific questioning in this domain. Assuming that morphological transcendence characterizes the mental representation of compound words in psycholinguistic terms, we might ask why such an organization would obtain. One reason that seems to be worthy of consideration was noted in the first section of this paper. It is through language that we read each other’s minds. This is at the core of all linguistic ability, social organization, and cultural development. But, if the psychocentric perspective on language representation that has been presented here is correct, the mind reading activity that characterizes human language must have the means to deal with the challenge of bridging the interpersonal chasm. If we assume that compound words are mental structures composed of transcended constituents linked to networks of morphological families in the mind of a speaker, we must also assume that they can activate comparable mental states in the

mind of a listener. Crucially, if this is the case, and if the richness of structure cannot be maintained in the signal that must cross the interpersonal chasm, the language system must employ every opportunity for reconstruction at the other end. This would include redundancy, the capacity for error repair, the capacity for reconstruction on the basis of partial evidence, and the possibility for heuristic strategies that can compensate for the paucity of bottom-up information. It seems to me that considerations such as these lie at the core of the principle of the maximization of opportunity. In this way, maximization of opportunity can be seen as a cover term for the manner in which the human language processing system deals with the need to successfully cross the interpersonal chasm in each of the thousands of acts of language communication in which we engage daily. The neuropsychological consequences of this perspective on compound representation and processing are that it promotes a shift of focus away from fixed representations of compound words in a mental lexicon of static elements. Instead, it moves us to a consideration of morphological processing in terms of individual and individualized abilities that capitalize on the morphological patterns that have been part of a language user’s experience. These abilities include the ability to repeat, comprehend, and produce existing multimorphemic words with appropriate semantics and syntactic properties. They also include the ability to understand novel multimorphemic constructions and to produce interpretable novel multimorphemic words. Indeed, the last of these skills is probably the one that is the critical indicator of whether an individual’s morphological skills are sufficient to deal with the interpersonal chasm. Finally, I would propose that the notion of morphological superstates has the potential to move us to models of neural instantiation of morphological knowledge in the brain that better capture the dynamic, flexible, and adaptive nature of morphological ability. We may be approaching the limits of the usefulness of the dictionary metaphor for the representation of words in the mind. But, it will probably remain the case that, at least Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1 –2)

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in the foreseeable future, some kind of metaphor will provide the primary means by which we conceptualize the manner in which the human brain possesses and creates meaning and knowledge. The metaphor of morphological superstates captures the claim that multimorphemic words exist in the brain as potentials for the acts of lexical production and comprehension. The words themselves, however, may indeed only have true reality and substance as constituted in the human acts of language comprehension and production. Manuscript received 22 June 2013 Revised manuscript received 12 November 2013 Revised manuscript accepted 10 December 2013 First published online 6 February 2014

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