1 Chapter 1. Introduction: status and definition of compounding ...

Drews, 2005, Feldman 1991), there has been relatively little research conducted with
compounds. Still, thus far, the evidence gained from studies involving compounds suggests an
influence of morphemic structure (see, for example, Dohmes, Zwitserlood, & Bolte 2004).
Although there has been some empirical evidence that morphology plays a role in the
processing of complex words, the question whether morphology is explicitly represented in the
system, or whether morphological structure emerges from representation representing form and
meaning remains unanswered. Some researchers argue in favor of explicitly including
information about a word‘s morphological structure in the mental lexicon. For example, Sandra
(1994) argues that the morpheme should be considered the basic unit of representation in the
lexical system. He points out that much of psycholinguistic research has focused on the access
representations that mediate between the perceptual system and the mental lexicon; he argues
that researchers should also focus on linguistic representations within the mental lexicon and that
these representations contain linguistically relevant information (such as semantic and syntactic
information). Roelofs and Baayen (2002) also support the inclusion of morphological
information in psycholinguistic theories of word processing, and suggest that morphemes might
act as planning units during the production of complex words rather than acting as units that
convey semantic information; that is, the morphological rules that govern a complex word‘s
structure might not influence a word‘s semantic interpretation (see also Aronoff 1994). Theories
such as the supralexical model of morphological representation (Giraudo & Grainger, 2000,
2001) assume that related forms are linked through higher (more abstract) morphemic
representations which form an interface between word form and word meaning, but that these
abstract morphological units are independent of word-form representation, and are accessed only
after form specific representations (such as phonology and orthography) have been activated.
413