Psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words

Abstract

Compounds are morphologically complex words made of different linguistic parts. They are very prevalent in a number of languages such as French. Different psycholinguistic characteristics of compounds have been used in certain studies to investigate the mechanisms involved in compound processing (see Table 7). We provide psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words. The words were normed on seven characteristics: lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, sensory experience, conceptual familiarity, imageability, age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency. Reliability measures were computed for the collected norms. Descriptive statistical analyses, and correlational and multiple regression analyses were performed. We also report some comparisons made between our normative data and certain norms obtained in other similar studies. The entire set of norms, which will be very useful to researchers investigating the processing of compounds, is available as Supplemental Material.

Are Two Words Recalled or Recognised as One? How Age-of-Acquisition Affects Memory for Compound Words

“…Compared to monosyllabic words, disyllabic words such as compound words have more irregular spelling-to-sound correspondence, thus readers need more time to process the pronunciation (Cortese & Schock, 2013). Despite this difference in terms of processing, we know that the subjective ratings of AoA contributes to lexical retrieval of compound words (Bonin et al, 2022;Elsherif et al, 2020;Juhasz et al, 2015, Juhasz, 2018. Compound word processing easily fits under the integrated account in that compound words are more irregular in terms of letter and sound, thus more time is required to process pronunciation.…”