The early moments of compound and pseudocompound visual word recognition were investigated by probing their “constituent” concepts (e.g., BED in bedroom and FAN in fanfare). This was achieved by concomitantly presenting target words in one visual field (left or right, projected to the right or left hemisphere, respectively) and a picture representing the referent of either the first or second “constituent” in the opposing visual field. The stimuli were presented for 133 ms followed by a backward mask and participants judged whether the word and picture were related to each other. The experimental manipulations consisted of target word type (compound or pseudocompound), word complexity (whole word or “constituent”), probed constituent position (first or second “constituent”), and word projection (left or right hemisphere). Our results suggest that the “constituents” of compounds and pseudocompounds are conceptually accessed. We discuss the implications of our findings for the nature of the visual word recognition system.

Is the visual word recognition system sensitive to compound (e.g., SNOWBALL) and pseudocompound (e.g., CARPET) constituents? To answer this question, we employed red-blue anaglyphs glasses to parse red-blue colored (pseudo)compounds at the fovea—by hypothesis split along the vertical meridian—and allowing for the independent processing of word segments in the visual word form area. Seventy-one participants performed a visual masked lexical decision task with 133 millisecond stimuli presentations. Compounds and pseudocompounds were either split at the (pseudo)morpheme boundary (legally-split) or within a (pseudo)morpheme (illegally-split). We found a statistically significant interaction effect between word type and legality. Planned comparisons revealed an advantage in accuracy for legally-split compounds and pseudocompounds over their respective illegal splits. Furthermore, legally-split compounds elicited more accurate responses than legally-split pseudocompounds. In line with previous findings supporting a purely morpho-orthographic prelexical process with faster presentation times, these findings suggest a temporally distinct mechanism during visual word recognition.