Psychon Bull Rev (2011) 18:364–370 and Hyönä (2004) showed that Finnish readers use orthographic parsing cues together with phonological cues (vowel quality) that are specific to Finnish when reading long, but not short, compounds. In another eye-movement study, Inhoff, Radach, and Heller (2000) also included a manipulation of boundary bigram legality when investi- gating three-constituent German compounds with or without artificial boundary markings (added interspaces and case marking). In contrast with Bertram et al. (2004), they found no effect of the legality of the bigram straddling the constituent boundary, but the effect might have been masked by the bigger effects of the artificial boundary markings. Of course, orthotactic parsing cues can be effective in compound processing only when compounds are decom- posed—that is, when their constituents are accessed separately. A large number of studies supports decomposi- tion (e.g., Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009; Koester, Gunter, & Wagner, 2007; Zwitserlood, 1994), and some studies suggest that decomposition operates in parallel with a whole-word access route (e.g., Kuperman, Schreuder, Bertram, & Baayen, 2009; Pollatsek, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2000). In the present study, we focused on the use of orthotactic parsing cues in native and nonnative compound recognition in Dutch, which belongs to a different language family than Finnish. The question was whether the decompositional process is influenced by orthotactic knowledge (cf. Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004, for derivations) and whether compound parsing differs for native and nonnative speak- ers. Although there is some evidence that the frequencies of bigrams influence the segmentation of words into syllables as sublexical units (Seidenberg, 1987; but see Rapp, 1992), left-to-right accounts of compound parsing assume that the characteristics of the constituent boundary have no effect (Libben, 1994; Taft & Forster, 1976). L2 speakers may differ from native speakers regarding the use of parsing cues for several reasons. First, lexical representations of L2 words are weaker and activated more slowly than L1 words because of their reduced subjective frequency (e.g., Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002). This might hinder and delay the identification of the individual components of a compound, which is presumably an essential part of compound parsing. To compensate for such a disadvantage, nonnative speakers might focus on other parsing cues that are more quickly available to them, such as orthotactic cues. This should hold especially for orthotactic cues that overlap between L1 and L2, as in the present experiment. A second possible difference between native and nonnative speakers is whether parsing is carried out at all (decomposition), or whether the word is stored and recognized as a whole (holistic processing). Some recent 365 studies argue that L2 speakers rely more on whole-word lexical storage than on parsing strategies (Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva, 2010; Silva & Clahsen, 2008). However, other studies question this claim (Diependaele, Duñabeitia, Morris, & Keuleers, 2010; Portin, Lehtonen, & Laine, 2007). All of these studies are concerned with the processing of derived or inflected words rather than with compounds. Thus, the literature on this point is equivocal and does not directly deal with L2 compound processing. Still, it is possible that the native–nonnative differences observed in some of the studies generalize to compounds. Given that the orthotactic cue effect is conditional upon decomposition, the effect of cue availability should then be smaller for L2 speakers. In our view, though, the opposite is also possible, given the generally low (whole-word) frequency of compounds. L2 speakers might rely more on decomposition because they have not yet established whole-word representations for the compounds. To summarize, we will test the effect of orthotactic parsing cues in compounds using the lexical decision task in L1 and L2 speakers. These compounds will contain an orthotactic cue (“illegal” bigram) or no cue at the boundary between the compound constituents. Method Participants Twenty native speakers of Dutch (three males) and 20 German–Dutch bilinguals (four males), recruited at Radboud University Nijmegen, participated for course credit or money. Participants were, on average, of the ages 24.7 (native speakers) and 24.2 (bilinguals). Bilinguals were German students who had been enrolled in Dutch university programs for at least 2 years. They filled in a language background questionnaire at the end of the experiment (see Table 1). Furthermore, both groups completed a yes–no vocabulary test for very advanced learners of Dutch, involving 40 low- frequency Dutch words and 20 nonwords, developed by the first author (see Lemhöfer, Spalek, & Schriefers, 2008). The mean scores in this test were 91.4% correct (SD = 3.9) for native and 69.8% correct (SD = 8.3) for bilingual speakers. Materials Words We selected 50 pairs of two-constituent noun com- pounds with identical first constituents, but differing in the legality of the boundary bigram. We will refer to these words as the “cue present” group (e.g., fietsbel; illegal bigram) and “cue absent” group (fietspomp; legal). All illegal bigrams were truly illegal (with a frequency of 0) as word/morpheme