Chapter 5 - General Discussion and Conclusion

Summary

Persian is an interesting language to observe in order to investigate lexical representations since it belongs to the same language family as English, French and German, thus it possesses the concatenative morphology of Indo-European languages. Yet it is different from many of those languages in its morphological richness and productivity as demonstrated by the productivity of its compound verbs, discussed in the previous chapter.

In this chapter, I will first offer a general discussion of the findings of the two experiments discussed in Chapter 3, and then discuss the contributions of these findings to psycholinguistics in Section 5.1. In Section 5.2, I will review some studies on the processing of idiomatic expressions in English. The processing of idiomatic expressions is relevant to the current study because Persian compound verbs are similar to English idiomatic expressions, in that both are composed of more than one word, each of which contributes to the meaning of the whole. Then, in Section 5.3, I will discuss the contribution of the present study to the complex predicate field. Finally, in Section 5.4, I will summarize the discussion and provide a conclusion.

The results of the present study will assist in comparing the findings of processing Persian compound verbs with the findings of experimental studies on the processing of complex and compound words in other concatenative languages to see if the same conclusions may be derived or not. As reported in Chapter 3, the current study has yielded results that seem to be more compatible with those of similar priming experiments in morphologically rich languages like German (Smolka et al., 2010; among others) than with the results of priming experiments in morphologically less rich languages like English or French (Fiorentino, 2006; Longtin et al., 2003; among others).

The results of the current study revealed several findings, such as: (1) compound verbs in Persian are decomposed into their constituents at early stages of processing; (2) at early stages of processing, decomposition is based on purely orthographic similarity; and (3) although both transparent and opaque compound constituents are facilitated while processing, transparency seems to have an impact on the processing.