Article

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential
framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be
structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of
both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If
this were the case, syntactic properties of both the compound and its
constituents should play a role when performing tasks involving compound
processing, e.g., compound-word reading. This issue is investigated in the
present study through an assessment of the performance of a deep dyslexic patient
(GR) in three compound-reading experiments. In the first experiment, verb-noun
(VN) compound nouns (e.g., lavapiatti, "dishwasher", lit. wash-dishes) were
employed as stimuli, while in the second, VN compound stimuli were embedded in
sentences, and were compared to paired verb phrases (e.g., lui lava piatti, "he
washes dishes"). Position-specific effects were ruled out by means of a third
experiment, which investigated the retrieval of noun-noun compounds (e.g.,
pescespada, "swordfish", lit. fishsword). In experiment 1, GR made errors on the
verb constituent more frequently than on the noun, an effect that did not emerge
in Experiment 2: when embedded in sentences, VN compounds were read significantly
better than verb-phrases and no grammatical-class effect emerged. In Experiment
3, the first and the second constituent were read with the same level of
accuracy. The disproportionate impairment, which emerged in reading the verb
component of nominal VN compounds, indicates that the grammatical properties of
constituents are being retrieved, and thus confirms access to the constituent
lemma-nodes. However, the results suggested a whole-word representation when
compounds are embedded in sentences; since the sentence context affects the
access to compounds through syntactic constraints, whole-word representation is
arguably at the lemma level as well (multiple-lemma representation). Experiment 3
indicates that these effects cannot be accounted for by a position-specific
impairment.
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Langue : ANGLAIS