One of the most fundamental issues for all models of the mental lexicon is how to represent essential information about the morphological structure of polymorphemic words. This paper describes the construction of a large-scale database of two-kanji compound words, which supplements a central component of data relating to 78,426 compound headwords from the Kojien dictionary with several components focusing on morphological family, morphological structure, and semantic category data. The database will be a particularly valuable resource in terms of supporting and extending research into the lexical retrieval and representation of two-kanji compound words within the Japanese mental lexicon from the perspective of compound word morphology, such as the series of constituent-morpheme priming experiments (Joyce, 1999, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Joyce & Masuda, 2004) that are discussed briefly.
Volume: 10, 06/2005
Pages: 30-44