Everything is psycholinguistics: Material and methodological considerations in the study of compound processing

The specific domain that I discuss in this paper is the processing of compound words. This research area is no more than 30 years old and my own involvement in it has been for about half that time. The study of how compound words are processed is a very specific sub-field, considerably narrower than the domains of which we would normally consider. Yet, for a variety of reasons which I discuss below, compound processing research finds itself associated with issues that are central to our views of the fundamental nature of lexical processing, and the enterprise of psycholinguistic research itself. These are certainly the domains of which we do want to take stock. My goal in this article is to address issues that are of general interest through the medium of research on the representation and processing of compound words. In considering the development, current state, and likely future trajectory of a specific research domain, this provides us with an opportunity to gain a broader perspective on the field as a whole and to step outside (and hopefully above) the normal course of research activity