The representation and processing of English and Chinese compound words were investigated in two sets of experiments, using respectively cross-modal and visual-visual priming lexical decision tasks. Related previous studies were also critically reviewed. A new framework of lexical representation, which is neither morpheme-based or whole-word based, was proposed. This framework assumes that, at both the formal and semantic levels and for both semantically transparent and opaque compounds, lexical representations for the whole words are built upon representations of their constituents, overlapping with each other in different ways at the orthographic and phonological as opposed to semantic levels.

Key words: lexical representation, morphology, morphological processing, compound words, Chinese