Psychon Bull Rev (2011) 18:364–370 DOI 10.3758/s13423-010-0044-y When bicycle pump is harder to read than bicycle bell: effects of parsing cues in first and second language compound reading Kristin Lemhöfer & Dirk Koester & Robert Schreuder Published online: 5 January 2011 # The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Reading and understanding morphologically com- plex words can sometimes be a particular challenge to nonnative speakers. For example, compound words consist of multiple free morphemes, oftentimes without explicit marking of the morpheme boundaries. In a lexical decision task, we investigated compound reading in native and nonnative speakers of Dutch. The compounds differed in that the letter bigram that formed the morpheme boundary could or could not occur within a Dutch morpheme, thus providing an orthotactic cue as to the position of the morpheme boundary. Native and nonnative speakers responded faster to compounds that contained such an orthotactic cue. Additional analyses showed that although native speakers used this cue for long, but not for short compounds, no such word length modulation was observed for nonnative speakers. It is suggested that orthotactic parsing cues are used during compound reading and possibly even more so in nonnative speakers. Keywords Visual word recognition . compound reading . Orthotactic parsing cues . Second language speakers Learning a second language (L2) can be a tedious enterprise, and each language has its own hurdles that Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13423-010-0044-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. K. Lemhöfer (*) : R. Schreuder Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour - Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: k.lemhofer@donders.ru.nl D. Koester Cognitive Interaction Technology - Center of Excellence, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany make life hard for nonnative speakers. In languages such as Dutch or German, for instance, reading compounds (words with more than one free morpheme, such as doghouse) can be problematic, because they are written without interspa- ces or hyphens. An extreme example from German is Selbstbedienungskontoauszugsdrucker (“self-service printer for account statements”), but even in two-constituent compounds, it can be difficult to identify the constituent boundary. In the Dutch example fiets-pomp (“bicycle pump”; hyphens are included only to indicate constituent boundaries), the location of the boundary does not follow from orthotactic constraints—that is, from the rules spec- ifying which letter sequences are well formed for a given language. The incorrect parsing *fiet-spomp also results in two legal and pronounceable letter strings and can thus not be rejected immediately. In contrast, in fiets-bel (“bicycle bell”), the morpheme boundary is easier to detect, since the bigram “sb” cannot occur within Dutch morphemes. Whether or not orthotactic parsing cues such as the legality of the boundary bigram are used in compound processing is not only unknown for L2 speakers, it has also rarely been investigated in native speakers. Of course, not only nonnative, but also native Dutch readers might be slowed down when orthotactic cues that indicate the boundary are missing. The few studies on effects of orthotactic boundary cues in native speakers have yielded controversial results. Taft and Forster (1976) used nonwords with clear (e.g., bonchmip) versus unclear constituent boundaries (e.g., glicerax) in lexical decision and found no effect of boundary type. However, rejecting nonwords might involve quite different mecha- nisms than word recognition. Libben (1994) showed that parsing preferences for novel English compounds with ambiguous parsings (e.g., busheater) are influenced by orthographic factors. In a study using eye-movement measures during sentence reading, Bertram, Pollatsek,