An Odd Lexical Form Error: Mis-Ordered Compounds

"Where is the paper-toilet?"

Have you ever heard a language learner flip the order of a compound word? Have you ever done it yourself? I have caught myself doing this on multiple occasions. Here's a recent example from a text chat:

Me saying "outage power" instead of "power outage" in Korean.

If you don't read Korean, basically what's happening here is I tried to ask if a power outage was still going on. Instead of "power outage", though, I wrote "outage power" (actually, the examples work the other way around in Korean, which will be important later). My wife (KyuJin Lee in the chat window) corrected me. Somehow, I had retrieved this word in the wrong order but with the correct constituent meanings. The two stems/roots in the Korean word for 'power outage' (or 'black out') are phonemically and orthographically similar, differing only by the type of nasal consonant in the coda (ㄴ v. ㅇ). But this has happened to me in the past with less similar stems. What could be going on here? And furthermore, why couldn't I recall any of my former ESL students doing this? (not to say that they never did, but I just couldn't recall it- and couldn't recall reading about these kinds of errors, where the lexical form and root meaning of individual stems was kept in tact).

For one thing, I probably had weak form representation in my mental lexicon for this particular word. I had only learned it the day before! You can see in this next screenshot where I engage in some negotiation of meaning and Kyujin provides an explanation ('the lights don't turn on') and a L1 translation for me: 

My first encounter with 정전 'power outage'.

I don't think it was purely related to weak phonological/orthographic form issues, though... I am very familiar with 전 as a stem that refers to electricity. And again, I've caught myself in the past flipping stems in compounds that are more phonemically/orthographically distinct. I asked r/linguistics for any ideas, and was suggested to look into morphological headedness and possible crosslinguistic transfer by u/Darkgamma- something that hadn't even crossed my mind.

Briefly, the concept of a 'head' in linguistics is how language is organized around some key, prime component. Syntactically, English is head-initial: the head typically comes at the beginning of the phrase or clause ('in the park', 'the man I met yesterday'). Korean, syntactically, is head-final ('park-in', 'yesterday met man'). However, morphologically, both languages are considered to be head-right. For most compounds, this means the primary element will come last. Take 'toothbrush' for example- it's a brush for teeth; it's essential category of being is 'brush'; 'tooth' just specifies what it's used for. Similarly, Korean for 'toothbrush' is 칫솔 ('tooth'+'brush'). So in my case, morphological headedness transfer shouldn't lead to errors. However, it can for people whose first language is left-headed, such as Spanish or French. Nicoladis (2002) reported that young French-English bilingual children were more likely to flip English compounds than monolingual peers.

Anyway, with headedness transfer not sufficiently explaining the matter in my case, I turned to alternate explanations, and found some promise in Ko, Wang, and Kim (2011) (there are a number of studies looking at Korean-English and Chinese-English compounds, I am finding). Looking and Korean-English bilinguals, they found beneficial processing effects for direct translations ('toothbrush' would fit this category) compared to translations that didn't line up (English 'bankbook' does not translate directly to Korean, which uses a compound formed from different stems to express the same concept). They also found an effect for word frequency of constituents in the compound, and concluded that there is cross-language lexical activation and morphological decomposition involved in L2 compound word recognition. This at least satisfies my error with 'power outage'/정전: despite both languages being morphologically head-right, Korean places the stem for 'power' on the right while English has it on the left, resulting in a misalignment for me cross linguistically- I tried to put 'power' on the left in Korean! Additionally, the stem 정 doesn't exactly line up semantically with 'out' or 'outage'... it's closer to 'stay' (as in stop moving, remain in place for awhile) in this sense. It would be very interesting to collect more instances of this sort of error in production and see how this all pans out.

If you have any stories about flipping compounds, I'd definitely be interested in hearing them!


References:

Ko, I. Y., Wang, M., & Kim, S. Y. (2011). Bilingual reading of compound words. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 40, 49-73.

Nicoladis, N. (2002). What's the difference between 'toilet paper' and 'paper toilet'? French-English bilingual children's crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Journal of Child Language, 29, 843-863.