Head-driven gender assignment in noun-noun compound recognition: evidence from a determiner priming task in German

A visual lexical decision task with noun-noun compound targets (e.g., Wasserflasche [waterbottle]) and gender-marked determiner primes (der, die, das [the] for masculine, feminine, neuter]) was used to examine how compound words are stored at a lexical-syntactic level. It was tested whether the embedded constituents activate their grammatical gender separately. Determiner primes were either congruent with the compound’s morphological head (die - Wasserflasche), the compound’s modifier (das - Wasserflasche), or incongruent with both constituents (der – Wasserflasche). Data from two online experiments are reported. The experimental design was identical but prime durations slightly varied. Head-congruent determiner primes speeded compound recognition in both experiments, but no effects were observed for modifier-congruent primes. The results of both experiments suggest activation of the grammatical gender of the head constituent, whereas the modifier’s gender seems not to be activated. Evidence in line with constituent-specific processes of compounds was only observed in the analysis of response accuracies of Experiment 2, as indicated by significant interactions between semantic transparency and constituent-specific determiner-priming effects. Our data are in line with head-driven gender assignment during noun-noun compound recognition.