The directed compound graph of English An exploration of lexical connectivity and its processing consequences

This study explores the consequences of morphological connectivity for English compounds, combining tools from graph theory with measures of lexical processing costs as available in the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007). The directed compound graph reveals a significant trend to acyclicity just as the directed affix graphs of Hay and Plag (2004); Plag and Baayen (2009); Zirkel (2010), and similar correlations of rank and productivity. Rank in the directed graph, however, fails to correlate with measures of processing complexity. In order to understand the high degree of acyclicity, it is hypothesized that the activation of more distant neighbors in the lexical network is disadvantageous. A measure for more distant lexical neighbors, secondary family size, is proposed, and shown to have an inhibitory effect in visual lexical decision and word naming. Furthermore, an inhibitory effect of the shortest path from head to modifier is documented, and shown to depend on a specific time window within which activation reaching the modifier disrupts the process of compound interpreta-tion