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This study examines the role of hyphens in the processing of phonetic and morphological words in English. English phonetic and morphological words that appear in English (e.g., adults) and without spaces (e.g., adults) were selected as target stimuli. Half of the selected phonetic and morphological words appeared more in the form of hyphens, and the other half appeared more without spaces. Words are included in sentences in dashed and blank forms. Participants were asked to read randomly selected sentences when eye movements were recorded.
The duration of the first fixation showed a significant interaction between the hyphen type and the spatial location presentation, which resulted in significant gains in processing for blank compound words indicated as hyphens. However, for words that are more familiar with hyphens such as spaces, the duration of the look increased significantly with the addition of hyphens. There is no significant effect on the type of hyphen or the duration of viewing the spatial location, indicating that there is no significant benefit in converting a hyphen to a blank hyphen. The results show that while spatial segmentation benefits the processing of the first word by facilitating lexical fragmentation, it does have a detrimental effect on subsequent word processing when a full word search occurs.
Though research has been done on spacing in compound word processing, little to no research h as been done on the effect of hyphenation and whether it facilitates word processing. A recent move by dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary towards converting many hyphenated words into either spaced or unspaced compound words presents the question of whether or not hyphenation serves an important purpose in word recognition and whether the move to delete them facilitates or impedes word processing. In this study, hyphenation of two groups of compound words was manipulated: those that generally appear hyphenated and those that generally appear unhyphenated. The eye-movements of participants were recorded in order to see if the deletion or insertion of a hyphen increases or decreases word processing speed.
A hyphenated word is a combination of two or more words that function as a single unit of meaning. There are three types of hyphenations: Those written as single words, with no hyphenation, are called closed hyphenations--the word "flowerpot," for example. Hyphenated hyphenations, such as "merry-go-round" and "well-being," are the second type. Those in the third group, called open hyphenations, are written as separate words – the nouns "school bus" and "decision making," for example.
We should keep in mind that hyphenations can function as different parts of speech. In such cases, the type of hyphenation can change, too. "Carry over," for example, is an open hyphenation as a verb but a closed hyphenation ("carryover") as a noun and an adjective:
In contrast, a hyphen that is always displayed and printed is called a hard hyphen. Soft hyphens are inserted into the text at the positions where hyphenation may occur. It can be a tedious task to insert the soft hyphens by hand, and tools using hyphenation algorithms are available that does this automatically. Current modules of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard provide language-specific hyphenation dictionaries.
The word segmentation rules of most text systems consider a hyphen to be a word boundary and a valid point at which to break a line when flowing text. However, this is not always desirable behavior, especially when it could lead to ambiguity (such as in the examples given before, where recreation and re-creation would be indistinguishable), or in languages other than English (e.g. a line break at the hyphen in Irish an t-athair or Romanian s-a would be undesirable). For this purpose, Unicode also encodes a nonbreaking hyphen (non-breaking hyphen, no-break hyphen). This character looks identical to the regular hyphen, but it is treated as a letter by word processors, namely that the hyphenated word will not be divided at the hyphen should this fall at what would be the end of a line of text; instead, the whole hyphenated word either will remain in full at the end of the line or will go in full to the beginning of the next line. The non-breaking space exists for similar reasons.
As for the types of English hyphenations, the majority of discussions about English hyphenating do not include prepositional hyphenations. Examples like into, onto, upon, without and within which could instantiate prepositional hyphenations are lexicalizations of two prepositions frequently occurring together, which have developed a unitary semantic interpretation with the consequence that they are perceived as one word by speakers. In addition, new formations based on the P+P pattern appear to be impossible: *withby, *upunder. However, forms like outdoors, offstage, overhead, uphill and underfoot, which are the union of a preposition and a noun, could be seen as prepositional hyphenations. This is the position defended, for example, by Boertien (1997) but the speakers consulted do not agree on the productivity of such forms, which explains why we leave them out from the present survey of English hyphenating (but we hope to study them further in future research). In the subsections of nominal and adjectival hyphenations, we will see that these forms can act as nouns and adjectives. Our survey of hyphenations in English starts with nominal hyphenations. Then verbal hyphenations are presented, and finally adjectival hyphenations are discussed.
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