Compound reading in German: Effects of constituent frequency and whole-word frequency in children and adults.

Current models of morphological processing differ in their assumptions about the recognition of compound words. The relative contribution of the first and second constituent and the whole-word remains unsolved. Particularly for beginning readers, the first constituent might have a privileged role attributable to more sequential decoding strategies. In a series of lexical decision experiments, the influence of constituent and whole-word frequencies on compound recognition was examined in German developing readers as well as adults. Results showed that whole-word and first constituent frequency interactively influenced response times in children. For adults, an effect of whole-word frequency only was obtained for the children's stimuli set, and noninteracting effects of whole-word frequency and first constituent frequency were found when using adult frequency measures. Together, the results suggest that developing readers already decompose compounds and that hybrid interactive models of morphological processing are most suitable to explain compound recognition across development. The applicability of amorphous models is also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).