Written word production and lexical self-organisation: evidence from English (pseudo)compounds

Elevation in typing latency for the initial letter of the second constituent of an English compound, relative to the latency for the final letter of the first constituent of the same compound, provides evidence that implementation of a motor plan for written compound production involves smaller constituents, in both semantically transparent and semantically opaque compounds. We investigate here the implications of this evidence for algorithmic models of lexical organisation, to show that effects of differential perception of the internal structure of compounds and pseudo-compounds can also be simulated as peripheral stages of lexical access by a self-organising connectionist architecture, even in the absence of morphosemantic information. This complementary evidence supports a maximizationof-opportunity approach to lexical modelling, accounting for the integration of effects of pre-lexical and lexical access.