Lexical and relational influences on the processing of Chinese modifier-noun compounds

The data from three experiments indicate that recent exposure to a similar Chinese modifier­-noun compound (e.g., 书柜, book cabinet or 饼店, cookie store) influences the ease of processing a subsequent compound (e.g., 书店, book store) by increasing the availability of the lexical entries for the individual constituents, and by altering the availability of the relation (e.g., noun FOR modifier) used to bind the two constituents. The results imply that theories and models about compound processing should take the representation of relational information into account and should be able to accommodate the influence of relation availability.