Chapter 3 - Experimental Studies

Summary

Other than a few exceptions, like Fiorentino and Fund-Reznicek's (2009) study on the morphological priming of compound constituents, most of the priming studies on multimorphemic words have been on affixed words. Moreover, there exists hardly any study on compound verb processing reported in the literature of experimental research on complex and compound word processing. Therefore, the present study will permit direct comparison with studies on polymorphemic words as well as with studies on compound nouns in order to investigate the possibility of generalizing the findings of masked morphological priming in affixed words and/or compound nouns to masked morphological priming in compound verbs. The special kind of compound under investigation in this study is the noun-verb compound verb in Persian.

As mentioned before, the nonverbal constituents of compound verbs in Persian are of different types and can feature a noun (e.g., gerye-kardan ‘tear-to do’ to cry), an adjective (e.g., daagh-kardan ‘hot-to do’ to get mad), a prepositional phrase (e.g., az-bar-kardan ‘from-on-to do’ to memorize), an adverb (e.g., pish-bordan ‘further-to take’ to succeed), or a complex nominal (e.g., sar-be-sar-gozaashtan ‘head-to-head-to put’ to tease). In the compound verbs examined in this study, which feature a noun-verb structure, both constituents of the compound are drawn from the open-class vocabulary of the language rather than the closed-class set of affixes—the focus, as we saw earlier, of many studies in the literature. In addition, in the compound verbs used in this study, the second constituent is the head, unlike in English compound nouns where the first constituent is the head—as reported by Fiorentino (2006) in his study on compound noun processing in English. Furthermore, since we are dealing with compound verbs, the prelexical decomposition of compound words will be more complex than the decomposition of affixed words (de Almeida and Libben, 2002).

In order to investigate whether the experimental studies on affixed nouns and verbs (Longtin et al., 2003; Deutsch et al., 1998; among others) as well as those on compound nouns (Fiorentino, 2006; among others) hold for Persian compound verbs, I ran three experiments. In Experiment 1, I examined constituent and semantic transparency effects as well as transparency similarity effect in transparent and opaque compound verbs.