What can we learn from novel compounds?

This chapter focuses on the question of how novel compounds are processed. To ad-
dress this question, morphologically unambiguous compounds such as shotden are
contrasted with morphologically ambiguous compounds such as clampeel (which
can have the constituent structure clam-peel or clamp-eel). I discuss how these
strings can be seen as lexical superstates and present a proposal for how they are
parsed. An experiment using progressive demasking and typing is reported. Typ-
ing results show evidence of activation of both versions of ambiguous compounds,
supporting the view that all lexical substrings in a multiword expression that can
be activated, will be activated. I claim that this type of activation is fundamental
to the understanding of morphological effects in both the visual recognition and
production of English words. Specifically, it enables the creation of morphological
superstates, the flexible morphological structures that Libben (2017) claims charac-
terize cognitive processing in lexical comprehension and production.