Psychon Bull Rev (2011) 18:364–370 group. The 42 remaining pairs were split into two groups of 21 pairs each.6 Table 4 shows the word characteristics for the two length groups. The mean RTs and error rates for the conditions, split for word length, are reported in Table 5. A repeated measures ANOVA with word length (short vs. long) as an additional factor was carried out on the z- transformed RTs and on arcsine-transformed error rates. We report only the relevant interactions involving word length and cue presence. For RTs, the interaction of cue presence and word length was significant across participants, but not across items, F1 (1, 36) = 5.43, p < 0.05; F2 (1, 40) = 1.26, p = 0.27. However, there was a significant three-way interaction of cue presence, word length, and participant group, F1 (1, 36) = 4.75, p < 0.05; F2 (1, 40) = 4.21, p < 0.05. Similarly, for error rates, the three factors interacted significantly, F1 (1, 36) = 10.15, p < 0.01; F2 (1, 40) = 3.99, p = 0.05. Separate analyses for bilingual and native speakers showed that word length did not interact with the cue effect for bilinguals (all Fs < 1), whereas this interaction was significant for native speakers: RTs, F1 (1, 19) = 12.9, p < 0.01; F2 (1, 40) = 4.21, p < 0.05; error rates, F1 (1, 19) = 16.56, p < 0.001; F2 (1, 40) = 7.64, p < 0.01. Pairwise t-tests showed that the cue effect for native speakers’ RTs was not reliable for short words, t1 (19) = –1.16, p = 0.26; t2 (20) = –0.98, p = 0.34, but was significant for long ones marginally across items: t1 (19) = 4.16, p < 0.001; t2 (20) = 1.87, p = 0.08. In the native speakers’ error rates, there was a cue effect in the predicted direction for long words that was marginally significant in the item analysis, t1(19) = 3.34, p < 0.01; t2 (20) = 1.73, p = 0.09, whereas it went into the opposite direction for short words, t1(19) = –3.21, p < 0.01; t2 (20) = –2.51, p < 0.05. Discussion Our main result, shorter recognition latencies for com- pounds containing an orthotactic parsing cue (i.e., a bigram at the constituent boundary that would be illegal within a morpheme), shows that both bilinguals and native speakers of Dutch benefit from the presence of such a cue during compound recognition. This finding suggests that sublex- ical information is used during compound parsing and aids the identification of the constituents. The parsing cue effect is at odds with classical left-to-right parsing accounts, which entail a parsing mechanism that is independent of the salience of the constituent boundary (see, e.g., Libben, 1994; Taft & Forster, 1976). Our results are in line with eye-movement data on sentence reading from Finnish, which, however, belongs to a different language family (Bertram et al., 2004). Furthermore, the faster lexical 6 Within the length groups, variables remained matched across the cue absent/present sets (all ps > 0.24 in t-and chi-square tests). 369 decision responses in the presence of a parsing cue are in accordance with accounts of morphological parsing that incorporate a decomposition route (Duñabeitia et al., 2009; Koester et al., 2007; Kuperman et al., 2009). On first sight, the nondifferent size of the cue effect for bilinguals and native speakers seems inconsistent with our initial supposition of possible differences in the size of the cue effect between these two groups. Due to slower access to a compounds’ constituents, we had hypothesized that L2 speakers might rely more on orthotactic parsing cues because of their greater availability, especially when they overlap between L1 and L2, as in the present case. In that case, there should have been an overall larger effect of cue presence for nonnative speakers, which was not what we observed. However, our additional analyses on the modulating role of word length suggest that rather than the simple quantitative difference we had initially expected, there are qualitative differences between native and nonnative speak- ers with respect to the cue effect. Native speakers showed the cue effect for long, but not for short compounds. Together with previous evidence (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003; Bertram et al., 2004), this data pattern suggests that short compounds are accessed primarily via the whole-word route, whereas long compounds are decomposed (using, possibly among others, orthotactic cues). In contrast, this interaction of compound length and cue effect was absent for bilingual speakers. This indicates that bilinguals decompose all compounds irrespective of length, and that they use orthotactic cues for this decomposition. Thus, as compared with the native speakers, bilinguals showed broader evidence of decomposition, not with respect to effect size, but with respect to the generality of the effect across word length. This is contradictory to the hypothesis that L2 speakers rely more on whole-word lexical storage and less on decomposition than native speakers, a claim made in some studies on inflected word forms (e.g., Clahsen et al., 2010). However, given the fundamental differences between com- pounds and inflections, our results do not speak to the debate on the processing of inflections by L2 speakers. Our data pattern fits more with the notion that L2 speakers might not (yet) have established whole-word representations for those compounds for which native speakers have done so (i.e., short compounds). This is likely to be a consequence of lower subjective frequencies for L2 compounds, given that whole- word representations may be restricted to words above a certain frequency limit (Alegre & Gordon, 1999; Lehtonen & Laine, 2003; but see McCormick, Brysbaert, & Rastle, 2009). In summary, the present study adds to the sparse and mixed literature by providing evidence for an important role of orthotactic information in decomposing compounds. It has to be noted, though, that given the overlap of Dutch and German bigram characteristics in our stimuli, our data do not speak to the question of whether it was German (L1)