Catalan speakers’/writers’ awareness of adjective compositionality

Abstract

The term compositionality refers to the extent to which the meaning of an expression can be derived from its constituent parts plus the way they are combined. This study investigates bilingual Catalan-Spanish speakers’/writers’ judgments of adjective compositionality and which word properties best explained informants’ decomposability judgments. Two complementary phases were conducted using 729 written adjectives drawn from the GRERLI-CAT1 corpus. In Phase 1, university students rated adjective decomposability on a four-point Likert scale. Hierarchical cluster analysis yielded a 13-point compositionality scale. In Phase 2, multiple regression analyses examined predictors of decomposability judgments. Adjective length emerged as the strongest predictor, while suffix family size and stem complexity contributed modestly. These findings support dual-route models of lexical access, suggesting that speakers alternate between holistic and decomposed processing depending on word properties. Overall, the results provide empirical support for a continuum-based model of morphological awareness, bridging morpheme-based and word-based approaches.