The English Spaced Compound Word Database

Riedmann, Casey M and Juhasz, Barbara J and Liversedge, Simon P and Zang, Chuanli (2026) The English Spaced Compound Word Database. Behavior Research Methods. ISSN 1554-351X

Text Riedmann et al. BRM final accepted version.docx - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (96kB)

Abstract

Compound words combine existing words to form a new concept. Spaced compound words represent one form of compound words in which the orthographic space is preserved between the two constituent words (e.g., coffee table). While recent research has mostly focused on unspaced compound words, spaced compound words offer important insight into the cognitive processes that support lexical retrieval and comprehension. Critically, whether readers process spaced compound words as single lexical units has important implications for how these items are stored and accessed in memory. To support future research, we developed the English Spaced Compound Word Database, wherein we collected Familiarity, Age-of-Acquisition (AoA), and Semantic Transparency (ST) ratings for 1,162 spaced compound words. We conducted correlational analyses to compare these ratings across words, as well as across previously collected data on compound words’ constituents. These analyses revealed a strong association overall between Familiarity ratings and AoA, as well as Familiarity and ST. When examining the relationship between ratings and the characteristics of a compound word’s constituents, we found a strong relationship between frequency, AoA, and structural simplicity (i.e., number of characters, syllables, morphemes, and lexical similarity) within all three rating tasks. These findings provide a basis for testing future theoretical models of lexical processing and reading.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	RISE Symplectic
Depositing User:	RISE Symplectic
Date Deposited:	22 Jun 2026 13:00
Last Modified:	29 Jul 2026 13:01
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4943

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