Context concreteness for the second constituent slows down compound-word processing

Abstract

The present paper investigates the effects of valence, arousal, and concreteness norms produced in Warriner et al. [2013], Brysbaert et al. [2014], and Snefjella & Kuperman [2016] on English compounding. The objects of study are over 2000 non‑spaced (concatenated) compounds taken from the LADEC database (Gagné et al. [2019]). In the multiple regression models, the representation (word-level) and context norms are used as independent variables. The lexical decision and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and the British Lexicon Project (BLP) are used as dependent variables. It is found that higher values of context concreteness for the second constituent are associated with slower response times across lexical decision and naming.

Keywords

• emotion
• compounding
• lexical decision
• naming
• context norms