TY - JOUR TI - The Role of Semantic Transparency in the Processing of Compound Words in Polish: Evidence from a Masked Priming Experiment AU - Hwaszcz, Krzysztof AU - Klimek-Jankowska, Dorota TI - The Role of Semantic Transparency in the Processing of Compound Words in Polish: Evidence from a Masked Priming Experiment AB - The main goal of the reported study is to test the cross-linguistic validity of the existing psycholinguistic models of morphological processing by contributing the results of a masked priming lexical decision experiment on the processing of Polish semantically transparent and opaque compounds. All these models are concerned with the question of whether morphologically complex words are decomposed during online processing or whether they are stored as chunks in the mental lexicon. We contribute new data from Polish showing that reaction times to target words semantically related to the heads of transparent compounds were significantly faster than to target words semantically related to the heads of opaque compounds in Polish. This may be interpreted as evidence in favour of the view that semantically transparent compound words are decomposed and we access the lemmas of their constituent elements whereas semantically opaque compounds are not decomposed and there is no access to their constituent lemmas. VL - Volume 12 (2017) IS - Vol. 12, Issue 3 PY - 2017 SN - 1732-8160 C1 - 2300-5920 SP - 145 EP - 171 DO - 10.4467/23005920SPL.17.008.7200 UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studies-in-polish-linguistics/article/the-role-of-semantic-transparency-in-the-processing-of-compound-words-in-polish-evidence-from-a-masked-priming-experiment KW - morphology KW - language processing KW - Polish compound words KW - complex words KW - semantic transparency KW - lexical decision KW - masked priming