366 Table 1 Results from the lan- guage background questionnaire given to bilingual participants a Self-ratings were given on a scale from 1 (low/rarely) to 7 (high/very often) Age of first contact with Dutch (years) Years experience with Dutch Self-ratingsa How often do you read Dutch literature? How often do you speak Dutch? How often do you listen to Dutch radio / watch Dutch TV? Self-rated reading experience in Dutch Self-rated writing experience in Dutch Self-rated speaking experience in Dutch Psychon Bull Rev (2011) 18:364–370 M 21.0 3.2 4.8 5.0 3.1 5.0 4.8 5.0 SD 2.7 2.8 1.5 1.5 1.9 0.9 0.9 1.2 Range 16–26 1–14 3–7 2–7 1–7 3–6 3–7 3–7 onsets and highly infrequent in any other word position, whereas legal bigrams were frequent on any word position. Bigram frequencies were highly similar across Dutch and German (see Table 2).1 None of the words or constituents existed in German in its exact form. None of the compounds contained embedded words across the constituent boundary, or linking elements between the constituents. Although the first constituents were identical for each word pair, the two stimulus groups were additionally matched for the logarithmic frequency of the second component and of the whole word according to the CELEX database (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995), number of letters, and (near-) cognate status (both of the second constituent and of the whole word) with respect to German (see Table 2). t-tests and Chi- square tests confirmed that there were no significant differ- ences between the two word groups regarding these variables (all ps > 0.30 except for the number of cognates among the second constituent, p = 0.10). A full list of stimuli is provided in the online Supplemental Materials. Nonwords Fifty pairs of nonwords were constructed in analogy to the compound word sets (e.g., bloefhengel; nonword bloef + “fishing rod,” vs. bloefroddel; bloef + “gossip”). Either the first or the second constituent of a nonword (each in 50% of nonwords) was an existing Dutch word. Nonexisting constituents were pronounceable and orthotactically legal in Dutch. Mean nonword length was 9.7 letters. Procedure and design Participants first carried out the Dutch vocabulary test as an unspeeded lexical decision task that did not contain any compounds except for one word (doornat, “soaked”) and one nonword (joutbaag). The “yes” answer was assigned to the participant’s dominant hand. In the instruction, speed 1 Three exceptions could not be avoided: “dw” (hoofdwond), “s” (prijslijst), and “sm” (huismerk) are legal bigrams in Dutch, but not in German. was not emphasized, because the test scoring was based on response accuracy only. For the main experiment, a speed instruction was added (asking participants to react as quickly and as accurately as possible). Otherwise, the instruction for lexical decision remained the same. The first block was a practice block, consisting of a new set of 16 word and 16 nonword compounds. The experiment proper consisted of 200 trials in eight blocks, plus two dummy trials at the beginning of each block. The order in which the word pairs were presented to the participants was counterbalanced, using four experimental lists of stimuli that were assigned to equal numbers of participants. The two items with the same first constituent always occurred in two different halves of the experiment. The items were presented in black 28-point Courier letters on white background. Each trial started with the presentation of a fixation point in the middle of the screen for 800 ms. Next, the target appeared and stayed on the screen until the response was given, or until 3,000 ms had passed. The ITI was 700 ms. After the main experiment, the bilingual participants were given a list of the experimental compounds on paper to indicate which compounds they were and were not familiar with. Furthermore, they filled in the language background questionnaire. The experimental session took about 20 min for native speakers and 30 min for bilingual participants. Results Two bilingual participants had to be excluded from the analyses because of high error rates (>33%). Similarly, two word pairs were excluded, because they contained word members that had elicited error rates higher than 60% even in the native speakers (erfoom and strijkkwintet).2 Only the word trials were analyzed. 2 The matching of the stimulus groups was not affected (all ps > 0.30 in t- and chi-square tests).