Reviewed by Marina Gorlach, Metropolitan State College of Denver
The eight chapters of this book imply that the ability to understand compound sequences is a reflection of the interplay between storage and computation processes in the mind. As noted by Ray Jackendoff (Foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), compounds ‘may be viewed as “protolinguistic ‘fossils”’, a structural type that has survived from the earliest forms of human language’ (50). Compounds represent one of the most universal types of derivation found in language and occupy a unique position at the crossroads between words and sentences in that they are easily segmentable into constituent morphemes, similar to the way sentences are segmentable into their constituent words.
Gary Libben’s introductory chapter, ‘Why study compound processing?’, emphasizes the opportunity compounding provides for understanding the fundamental aspects of mental architecture. His data show that compound processing is characterized by redundancy rather than efficiency: both whole-words and their constituents are initially activated in the mental lexicon and subsequently inappropriate activations are inhibited—for example, in case of semantically opaque constituents.
Wolfgang U. Dressler provides a comprehensive classification of compounds on the basis of their structural, semantic, and syntactic properties in ‘Compound types’. In the next chapter, ‘Compound representation and processing: A cross-language perspective’, Gonia Jarema brings together cross-linguistic evidence for the representation of compounds in the mental lexicon and assesses the possibility of uncovering general principles of compound access and storage in natural languages. Studies conducted in twelve languages (eight Indo-European and four non-Indo-European) of unimpaired and impaired (e.g. aphasic) populations show that the constituents are indeed activated during compound processing, which underscores the privileged status of the first constituent.
In ‘The neuropsychology of compound words’, Carlo Semenza and Sara Mondini present the findings of several studies of the processing of compound words in aphasiology. The data from neuropsychology provide evidence that compound processing involves decomposition, even for opaque compounds, as well as simultaneous activation of the constituents in retrieval and activation of all meaningful representations, both whole words and isolated components.
In ‘Preschool children’s acquisition of compounds’, Elena Nicoladis discusses the factors that affect children’s ability to create and understand novel compounds. Research to date is limited to just noun-noun compounds or the English object-verb-er construction, which overlooks many structural types of compounds and excludes the semantically opaque ones.
Erika S. Levy, Mira Goral, and Loraine K. Obler explore the ways in which bilinguals process compounds in ‘Doghouse/chien-maison/niche: Approaches to the understanding of compound processing in bilinguals’. They include an overview of the psycholinguistic studies of the bilingual lexicon and a discussion of particular characteristics of compounds that vary cross-linguistically. Furthermore, they investigate hypotheses on how such differences might affect the way bilinguals process compounds. Analyzing reaction times and transfer errors in both unimpaired and polyglot aphasic bilinguals, the authors compare the role of factors such as the productivity of compounds within a language, semantic transparency, morphological headedness, the position of constituents in a string, and morphological constraints. They conclude that further documentation of bilinguals’ transfer errors in the on-line processing of compounds may reveal active links between first language and second language lexemes.
The relationship between research on conceptual combination in compounds and the structure of the mental lexicon is discussed in ‘Conceptual combination: Implications for the mental lexicon’ by Christina L. Gagné and Thomas L. Spalding. Comparing schema-based approaches to conceptual combination with the competition-among relations-in-nominals (CARIN ) approach, the authors bring strong empirical evidence that supports the CARIN theory by demonstrating that the modifier has a primary effect on relation selection in both familiar and novel compounds. This implies the processing of familiar and novel compounds is more similar than most theories of mental lexicon would expect.
In ‘Processing Chinese compounds’, James Myers presents an overview of compound processing in Chinese. Unlike other languages, Chinese visual stimuli (i.e. characters) have a great influence on the access to spoken words. Similar to other languages, activation of the components of a compound in Chinese depends on semantic transparency, modality, and the mutual predictability of compounds.
The process of compounding and access to familiar compound words is critical to understanding the mental lexicon as a whole, and this volume makes an important contribution to this field.