English language and linguistics research seminar: Henrik Gyllstad (Lund University), Lari-Valtteri Suhonen (University of Borås) and Angelica Zordan (University of Verona): Compounds:Investigating representation and processing in the multilingual lexicon

In this talk, we will present an on-going psycholinguistic project which is part of a larger transdisciplinary research program, Transdisciplinary Approaches to Learning, Acquisition, Multilingualism (TEAM; www.team-up.lu.se), funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2024-2029).

The overall aim of the project is to advance our understanding of how L1 Swedish, L1 Finnish and L1 Italian adult non-native speakers of English process nominal compounds, and to what extent they rely on activation of form and meaning representations of whole compounds and/or constituents.

We will account for the rationale and aims of the project and highlight various characteristics of compounding in English and in the three typologically different targeted languages, such as morphological structure, headedness, semantic transparency, and orthography. We will furthermore present the methodologies planned for the experiments, including masked priming lexical decision tasks, textual and visual world eyetracking, and translation recognition. Finally, we will share examples of some challenges we have encountered thus far and discuss potential solutions.