Jacolien van Rij

1. Introduction In addition to single words, a large part of our vocabulary consists of multiword expressions, such as how are you (greeting) or know by heart (to be able to retrieve some information from memory). These multiword expressions are estimated to comprise between 20% and more than 50% of our spoken and written language (e.g., Biber et al. 1999; Erman and Warren 2000).

We constantly try to interpret our environment. For example, when driving and seeing a sequence of letters on a road sign, we intuitively try to read it to not miss out on important information. In these situations, a process to determine whether such a sequences of letters actually corresponds to a word might precede our reading attempts.