In contrast, in a compound such as Tee masc beutel masc the constituent nouns share their gender (masculine), which constitutes a gender match. The constituents thus differ or mismatch in gender, but note that this is irrelevant for gender specification of the whole word ( neut). While Haus has neuter gender, the gender of the modifier, the first constituent ( Vogel) is masculine. As in English, the rightmost constituent of German compounds is the morphological/morpho-syntactic head, which determines syntactic features including grammatical gender (e.g., Williams, 1981). Therefore, a word's gender is assumed to be stored in the mental lexicon, as an inherent property of the lexical specification of nouns (see Levelt, 1989 Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999). Though phonological and semantic regularities exist that highly correlate with gender in German (e.g., Köpcke and Zubin, 1984 Schwichtenberg and Schiller, 2004 Zubin and Köpcke, 2009), gender is not fully predictable by such features. German also codes for grammatical gender, with three gender classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) that are overtly marked on the definite determiners of nouns: der masc, die fem, and das neut. Our study focuses on the production of semantically transparent and opaque compounds in German, a morphologically rich language with many compounds. To date, studies on the actual production of complex words are quite rare (e.g., Roelofs and Baayen, 2002 Lüttmann et al., 2011a Jacobs and Dell, 2014). Most data that test such predictions come from comprehension studies, or from studies on the interface between comprehension and production, presenting complex words as distractors to pictures with monomorphemic names (e.g., Zwitserlood et al., 2002 Köster and Schiller, 2008 Lüttmann et al., 2011b Verdonschot et al., 2012). Dual-route accounts assume morpheme-based processing for semantically transparent complex words (e.g., birdhouse), but (more) holistic processing for opaque words (e.g., hotdog).
![a word for not transparent a word for not transparent](http://img.picturequotes.com/2/90/89272/a-word-is-not-a-crystal-transparent-and-unchanged-it-is-the-skin-of-a-living-thought-and-may-vary-quote-1.jpg)
Semantic transparency refers to the meaning relation between the complex word and its constituents. Furthermore, dual- or multiple-route accounts assume that the type of processing depends on different characteristics of complex words, such as their frequency or semantic transparency (e.g., Zwitserlood, 1994 Schreuder and Baayen, 1995 Kuperman et al., 2009 Marelli and Luzzatti, 2012 Xu and Taft, 2015). Full-listing models predict holistic processes for familiar complex words, and morpheme-based processes for novel complex words only (Butterworth, 1983), whereas full-decomposition models predict morpheme-based processes for novel and familiar complex words alike (Taft and Forster, 1976). While network theories assume that morphology is not explicitly represented in the lexical system (Plaut and Gonnerman, 2000 Baayen et al., 2013), others argue that morphological structure does play a role.
![a word for not transparent a word for not transparent](https://internetpoem.com/img/quotes/316/a-word-is-not-a-crystal-transparent-and-unchanging-quote-by-oliver-wendell-holmes_1.png)
It is still a matter of debate whether the morphological structure of polymorphemic words, such as compounds (e.g., sunflower), determines their lexical representation and processing, and if so, how. The data also fit with a more parsimonious, holistic representation for all compounds at the lemma level, when differences in co-activation patterns for semantically transparent and opaque compounds are considered. In principle, this pattern is compatible with a multiple lemma representation account for semantically transparent, but not for opaque compounds. A significant gender-congruency effect was obtained with semantically transparent compounds, consisting of two constituent nouns of the same gender, only.
![a word for not transparent a word for not transparent](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ev-4mY5VIAAQeCl.jpg)
Furthermore, gender congruency between compounds and distractors did not speed up naming in general, but interacted with gender match of the compounds' constituent nouns, and their semantic transparency. This supports retrieval of constituent morphemes for semantically transparent and opaque compounds during speech production. Both constituent distractors strongly facilitated compound naming, and these effects were independent of the targets' semantic transparency. Effects of gender-congruent but otherwise unrelated distractor nouns, and of two morphologically related distractors corresponding to the first or second constituent were assessed relative to a completely unrelated, gender-incongruent distractor baseline. Compound targets were either semantically transparent (e.g., birdhouse) or opaque (e.g., hotdog), and their constituent nouns either had the same or a different gender (internal gender match). Using a picture-word interference paradigm, participants produced determiner-compound noun phrases in response to pictures, while ignoring written distractor words. This study examines the lexical representation and processing of noun-noun compounds and their grammatical gender during speech production in German, a language that codes for grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter).