Seven lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the influence of complex structure on the processing speed of English compound words. The first two experiments revealed that semantically transparent compounds (e.g., rosebud) were processed more quickly than matched monomorphemic words (e.g., giraffe). Experiment 3 investigated the influence of the constituents on processing speed of transparent compounds by manipulating constituent frequencies while controlling overall compound frequencies. Compounds with high-frequency first constituents were responded to more quickly than compounds with low-frequency first constituents. No such effect was found for the second constituent. In Experiment 4, opaque compounds (e.g., jailbird or hogwash) were processed more quickly than monomorphemic words. When the decomposition route was reinforced in Experiments 5-7, however, the advantage for opaque compound processing disappeared. In addition, there was even evidence of inhibition due to constituent frequency in opaque compound processing in that high-frequency constituents were associated with slower responses. This research suggests that morphological decomposition initiated by complex structure aids rather than hinders English transparent compound processing because this access route activates consistent information with the direct retrieval of whole word representations. On the other hand, morphological decomposition does not necessarily aid opaque compound processing because this access route can compute a meaning that conflicts with the meaning retrieved by the direct access. For example, the decomposition route would yield the meaning for jailbird as "a bird that lives in jail". This interpretation and the retrieved meaning --- a prisoner would interfere with each other.
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