How language users from different linguistic backgrounds cope with forms of complexity is still a territory with many unanswered questions. The current book is concerned with morphologically and syntactically complex items, that is, derivatives, inflected forms, compounds, phrases and forms related by agreement and examines how these constructions are acquired and learned in a great range of different languages, such as Turkish, Welsh, Basque and Catalan. Relying on a variety of methodologies targeting production or comprehension, among others, lexical decision and priming experiments, an EEG study, a corpus analysis and a reading test, the authors consider data from native speakers mastering one or more languages and second-language users. Overall, the volume reflects upon and contributes to our understanding of how the pecularities of language and its users affect the learnability of complex forms.

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.