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In the present study, we asked the question: how do bilingual children process compound words in their two languages? Research on bilingual processing of compounds provides a special perspective for testing the models in the two seemingly independent fields: bilingual lexicon and compound processing. There is an ongoing debate in the area of compound processing as to whether and how compound words are decomposed into their constituents (e.g., Libben, 1998; Libben, Gibson, Yoon, & Sandra, 2003; Sandra, 1990; Zwitserlood, 1994). Results from previous studies have provided converging evidence that the constituent morphemes are activated in compound processing among adults (e.g., de Jong, Feldman, Schreuder, Pastizzo, & Baayen, 2002; Jarema, Busson, Nikolova, Tsapkini, & Libben, 1999; Kehayia et al., 1999; Libben et al., 2003; Zwitserlood, 1994); however, only a few studies have investigated how children process compound words (e.g., Nicoladis, 2002, 2003, 2006). Our study examined whether bilingual children decompose compound words into constituent morphemes in their two languages.
The role of semantic transparency is another key issue in the area of compound processing (e.g., Libben, 1998; Libben et al., 2003; Sandra, 1990; Zwitserlood, 1994). Semantic transparency refers to the consistency between the meaning of a compound word and its constituent morphemes. For example, class and room in classroom are transparent constituents from which one can easily infer the meaning of classroom, but dog in hotdog is opaque, and one cannot infer the meaning of hotdog directly from dog. Sandra (1990) investigated the effect of semantic transparency in Dutch speakers via a semantic priming paradigm. Results showed that semantic associates of constituents primed only semantically transparent compounds (e.g., death primed birthday), but not the opaque compounds (e.g., bread did not prime butterfly). Sandra suggested that the constituents of semantically opaque compounds are therefore not activated. The semantic-priming paradigm used by Sandra was criticized by later researchers. For example, Libben (1998) argued that both transparent and opaque compounds are processed through a morphological-decomposition procedure at the lexical form level. The absence of a semantic-priming effect for opaque words was due to the lack of connections between opaque compounds and their constituents at the semantic level. For example, the opaque compound hogwash activates the lexical representations of hogwash,...