This text presents new work on the psycholinguistics & neurolinguistics of compound words & shows the insights offered on natural language processing & the relation between language, mind & memory.

This book presents new work on the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of compound words. It shows the insights this work offers on natural language processing and the relation between language, mind, and memory. Compounding is an easy and effective way to create and transfer meanings. By building new lexical items based on the meanings of existing items, compounds can usually be understood on first presentation, though - as, say, breadboard, cardboard, cupboard, and sandwich-board show - the rules governing the relations between the components' meanings are not always straightforward. Compound words are segmentable into their constituent morphemes in much the same way as sentences can be divided into their constituent words: children and adults would not otherwise find them interpretable. But compound sequences may also be independent lexical items that can be retrieved for production as single entities and whose idiosyncratic meanings are stored in the mind. Compound words reflect the properties both of linguistic representation in the mind and of grammatical processing. They thus offer opportunities for investigating key aspects of the mental operations involved in language: for example, the interplay between storage and computation; the manner in which morphological and semantic factors impact on the nature of storage; and the way the mind's computational processes serve on-line language comprehension and production. This book explores the nature of these opportunities, assesses what is known, and considers what may yet be discovered and how.

This is the first book devoted entirely to the history of compound words in Spanish. Based on data obtained from Spanish dictionaries and databases of the past thousand years, it documents the evolution of the major compounding patterns of the language. It analyzes the structural, semantic, and orthographic features of each compound type, and also provides a description of its Latin antecedents, early attestations, and relative frequency and productivity over the centuries. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data shows that although most compound types have survived, they have undergone changes in word order and relative frequency. Moreover, the book shows that the evolution of compounding in Spanish may be accounted for by processes of language acquisition in children. This book, which includes all the data in chronological and alphabetical order, will be a valuable resource for morphologists, Romance linguists, and historical linguists more generally.

This book brings together current research findings on the involvement of word-internal structure for the purpose of word reading (especially morphological structure). The central theme of reading complex words is approached from several angles, such that the chapters span a wide variety of topics where this issue is important. It is a valuable resource for all researchers studying the mental lexicon and to those who teach advanced courses in the psychology of language.

Measurement and analysis of eye movements are two of the most powerful ways to study the workings of the human mind. This Special Issue on eye movements and information processing in reading presents an overview of experimental research based on this methodology. Eye movements provide a unique opportunity to examine principles of human information processing in a well-structured visual environment while people engage in a natural cognitive task. At the same time, oculomotor measures can be used as a tool to develop and test psycholinguistic hypotheses about the processing of written language. The papers in this issue contribute to both aspects, addressing issues that dominate current debates in the field. Seen from the angle of visual information processing, a major theme is the role played by parafoveal information for different types and levels of processing and for oculomotor control in reading. This includes effects of visual and linguistic word properties on the selection of words for fixation and the specification of saccade amplitudes. Clearly the most controversial question in this context concerns the allocation of attention, with positions ranging from a sequentially moving spotlight to a gradient of spatially distributed processing. Related to this is the issue of serial vs. parallel word processing and the fundamental question as to what extent the duration of fixations in reading is related to lexical processing. Taking a psycholinguistic perspective, the topics addressed include several levels of language processing from orthography to pragmatic information in sentence reading. New approaches to the study of morphologically complex words are reported, together with novel work revealing the complex nature of the apparently accessible, but elusive, concept of word frequency. Other papers reflect current theoretical discussions centered on the development of computational models of the reading process and contribute to the empirical base of these discussions. Taken together, this collection of papers, supplemented by an introduction to the field and a commentary on major issues, presents a comprehensive and up-to-date perspective on a research area currently characterised by numerous theoretical and empirical disputes. The papers will be of particular appeal to readers interested in basic and applied psycholinguistics, attention and visual perception, motor control and the modelling of complex cognitive processes.

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.

Word storage and processing define a multi-factorial domain of scientific inquiry whose thorough investigation goes well beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplinary taxonomies, to require synergic integration of a wide range of methods, techniques and empirical and experimental findings. The present book intends to approach a few central issues concerning the organization, structure and functioning of the Mental Lexicon, by asking domain experts to look at common, central topics from complementary standpoints, and discuss the advantages of developing converging perspectives. The book will explore the connections between computational and algorithmic models of the mental lexicon, word frequency distributions and information theoretical measures of word families, statistical correlations across psycho-linguistic and cognitive evidence, principles of machine learning and integrative brain models of word storage and processing. Main goal of the book will be to map out the landscape of future research in this area, to foster the development of interdisciplinary curricula and help single-domain specialists understand and address issues and questions as they are raised in other disciplines.