Ambiguous novel compounds and models of morphological parsing

This paper reports on two experiments that investigated the activation of morphemes in English novel compounds. All experiments employed stimuli that we have called "ambiguous novel compounds." These words (e.g., clamprod) have two interpretable parses (e.g., clam + prod or clamp + rod) and thus offer an opportunity to investigate which parses are preferred, whether both possible parses are computed, and whether parsing procedures ''divide'' words into their morphological constituents or "extract" constituent representations. The results suggest that morphological parsing does not simply divide a word into its constituents, but rather generates multiple representations that are subsequently evaluated. (C) 1999 Academic Press.