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Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 12:1 (2017) ► pp.1–20

Reading monomorphemic and compound words in Chinese

| Shandong Normal University, China
| University of Turku, Finland
| Shandong Normal University, China
| Jinan University, China
| University of Turku, Finland | Tomsk State University, Russia

Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to study the recognition of two-character Chinese monomorphemic and compound words by adult native Chinese readers. In Experiment 1, the words appeared non-spaced, whereas in Experiment 2 a space was inserted between the two characters. An interaction between word type and spacing reflects a trend for spacing to slow down the recognition of monomorphemic words and speed up that of compound words. The word frequency effect was steeper for monomorphemic than compound words. The number of strokes in the first and the second character influenced the recognition time for compound words, but not for monomorphemic words. The results are interpreted in the light of the parallel dual route model of morphological processing. The holistic route is more prevalent in recognizing Chinese monomorphemic, while the morphological decomposition route is more prevalent in processing Chinese compound words.

Keywords: Chinese, word recognition, morphological processing, spacing
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Apparatus
    • Materials
    • Procedure
    • Statistical analyses
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.12.1.01cui
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