Garden plants and butter knives

Abstract

Garden plants and butter knivesthe effects of lexical and relation priming on nominal compound processing by native and non-native speakers of English Compounds are a frequent occurrence in the English language, but the way in which speakers, both native and non-native, process compounds is still a topic of discussion. Two factors have an influence on the recognition speed of compounds -lexical priming and relation priming. The former refers to faster recognition if a target and a prime compound share a common lexeme, while the latter refers to the inner relationships between modifiers and heads within a compound. The study conducted by Gagné & Spalding (2004) shows a significant effect of relation priming on recognition of familiar compounds, while De Cat et al. (2015) report that highly proficient non-native participants use similar strategies for processing compounds as native speakers. The aim of this paper is to replicate these results by using sense-nonsense tasks with familiar compounds and native and highly proficient non-native participants to examine the effects of lexical and relation priming in these two groups. We hypothesize that the native speakers should provide faster reaction times and higher accuracy rates but that both groups would display similar facilitation effects with different types of primes, which the results of the study confirm. Frane Malenica -Lucija Žinić:Garden plants and butter knives -the effects of lexical and relation priming on nominal compound processing by native and non-native speakers of English IntroductionEnglish compounds have a rather straightforward structure -two or more lexemes are connected into a new form with its own new meaning and structure (Olsen 2000: 897-905). However, what is not immediately seen are the inner relationships between the constituents of a compound, the head and the modifier. At the most general level, compounds are divided into endocentric and exocentric, based on the broad relationship between the two constituents. Endocentric compounds, which are the main focus of this research, are characterized by the "presence of a head constituent" (Scalise & Bisetto 2009: 54). The head carries both the grammatical and semantic functions of the compound while it is further specified by the first constituent, i.e. the modifier, hence straw in straw hat specifies a particular type of hat (Olsen 2000: 905-908).The second dichotomy relevant for this paper is the one between root/primary and synthetic/deverbal compounds. The noun-noun (NN) compounds used in this research (e.g. marble table, linen napkin, flour sack) are primary in nature, i.e. their head constituents are not derived from a verb, as is the case with synthetic compounds (Roeper & Siegel 1978;Selkirk 1982;Lieber 1983). Since the heads of these compounds are derivationally simple nouns (i.e. do not contain a verbal element), they do not invoke thematic relations within one another, as deverbal nouns do. Because of this property, their creation is less restricted, open to numerous interpretat...