Gary Libben, Brock University

A great advantage of morphology is that it allows new words within a language to be created from existing lexical elements.  This process, in turn, allows for the development of morphological families that relate words to one another in the mind.  In this way, compound words such as teacup, eggcup, and buttercup can be created from the existing lexical elements tea, egg, butter and cup.  However, most speakers of English would likely consider buttercup (a type of flower) to be less semantically transparent than the much more straightforward compounds teacup (a cup in which to place tea) or eggcup (a cup in which to place an egg).

In this talk, I propose a psycholinguistic account of how such reduction of semantic transparency is related to vocabulary growth among monolinguals, bilinguals, and multilinguals.  I claim that, as compound families grow, the reduction of semantic transparency often signals the fact that constituents within a compound have taken on new morphological and lexical properties through a process that I have called morphological transcendence. I present data that demonstrate how the tracking of keystroke latency in word typing can reveal effects of semantic transparency in lexical production and how it can be used to better understand morphological structuring and vocabulary growth in the mental lexicon.

Part 1 of 2 in a series of talks on Morphological Processing, organised by Henrik Gyllstad as part of the TEAM Research Program.