Lexical composition and the production of compounds Evidence…词汇构成和化合物的生产证据.pdfVIP

LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES, 2001, 16 (4), 337–366 Lexical composition and the production of compounds: Evidence from errors in naming William Badecker Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA Whether the production of a morphologically complex word recruits compositional procedures appears to depend on the properties of the particular word-formation process at hand. Since the types of word formation that appear to enlist composition include regular inection and productive derivation, an argument can be made for the role of morphological productivity in determining the approach taken to lexical production. However, morphological productivity typically entails semantic composition- ality, so it could be that compositional procedures are exploited only when the meaning of the complex word is exhaustively characterised in terms of the meanings of its immediate morphological constituents. It is argued here that the lexical production system takes a compositional approach to processing morphologically complex forms in cases of productive word formation even if the semantics of the word cannot be derived formally from the meaning of its constituents. Evidence is presented from a case of acquired naming impairment in a patient whose ability to name objects with compound names is particularly disrupted. INTRODUCTION Many of the central issues in the theory of lexical processing pertain to how morphological structure determines the way in which a word is Requests for reprints should be addressed to William Badecker, Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218–2685, USA.