ABSTRACT
The processing and representation of Dutch compound words was investigated as a function of their semantic transparency. The first experiment, with immediate partial repetition of the constituents of the compounds, provided clear evidence for the sensitivity of the lexical processing system to morphological complexity, independent of semantic transparency. This was confirmed in a second experiment, with semantic priming of the meaning of the constituents. Marcus Taft and Ken Forster used pseudoword compounds containing either two existing morphemes or one real word and one pseudoword. To test whether the degree of semantic transparency of compounds has a differential effect on their efficiency as primes for their constituent words, different types of compounds served as primes in the experiment. It is generally accepted that the combined use of semantic relatedness of primes and targets and of lexical decision as the subjects' task guarantees the involvement of the semantic level of lexical representation.
