2. Lexical processing
Compounds: A window onto the interplay between storage and computation in the mental lexicons of multilingual non-native English speakers
This project will investigate the interplay between storage and computation in the mental lexicons of multilingual non-native English speakers. The linguistic focus will be nominal compounds, and the participants will be adult first language speakers of Finnish, Italian, and Swedish, with native English speakers as controls. These language constellations will provide opportunities to study both processing and representation, and map the influence of a host of factors, such as compound form structure including headedness and cross-language formal incongruency, semantic transparency and compound decomposition, as well as orthography. To achieve this, a range of psycholinguistic experimental methods and tasks will be used, such as masked priming lexical decision, visual world eyetracking, textual eyetracking, and translation recognition.
