Xiaolin Zhou

Morphology, Orthography, and Phonology in Reading Chinese Compound Words

The interaction between morphological, orthographic, and phonological information in reading Chinese compound words was investigated in five sets of experiments, using both masked priming and visual-visual priming lexical decision tasks. Words sharing common morphemes were consistently found to facilitate each other, although the priming effects were modulated by spatial overlap of orthographic forms in masked priming. Priming effects were also found for words having homographic-homophonic characters, but the effect tended to be inhibitory when the SOA between primes and targets was long and when the competing morphemes corresponding to the characters were at the initial constituent position of primes and targets. Priming effects between words having homographic but non-homophonic characters were more inhibitory, compared with effects between words having homographic-homophonic characters. Words having orthographically different homophonic morphemes did not prime each other throughout the experiments. The...

Words, morphemes and syllables in the Chinese mental lexicon

Abstract This research uses the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. In three experiments, subjects made lexical decision responses to spoken disyllabic words and nonwords. In Experiment 1, word frequency, morpheme frequency and syllable frequency were covaried, with either the first or second constituent of the compound held constant. Only word-frequency effects were found for real words, although responses were slower to nonwords with high-frequency initial syllables. The results for real words were replicated in Experiment 2, where syllable and morpheme frequency were varied for pairs of words sharing common morphemes in first or second position. Experiment 3, however, showed that when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. Experiment 3 also verified that syllable frequency effects for nonwords cannot be reliably ...

Morphological Structure in the Chinese Mental Lexicon

This paper investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. A series of 12 experiments, all using disyllabic compounds in a variety of auditory-auditory priming tasks, contrast the effects of four different typea of prime-target relationship (identical, morphological, homophonic, homographic), while varying the constituent position of the related syllables in primes and targets. These priming effects were evaluated both in paired priming tasks. with a 150-msec inter-stimulus interval (ISI) between prime and target, and in delayed repetition tasks, using short, medium and long lags (intervening items ranging from 1 to 40). The results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model).

The relative time course of semantic and phonological activation in reading Chinese.

The relative time course of semantic and phonological activation was investigated in the context of whether phonology mediates access to lexical representations in reading Chinese. Compound words (Experiment 1) and single-character words (Experiments 2 and 3) were preceded by semantic and phonological primes. Strong semantic priming effects were found at both short (57 ms) and long (200 ms) stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), but phonological effects were either absent in lexical decision (Experiment 1), were present only at the longer SOA in character decision (Experiment 2) or were equally strong as semantic effects in naming (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 revealed facilitatory or inhibitory effects, depending on SOA, in phonological judgments to character pairs that were not phonologically but semantically related. It was concluded that, in reading Chinese, semantic information in the lexicon is activated at least as early and just as strongly as phonological information.

Abstractness, Allomorphy, and Lexical Architecture

Two intra-modal immediate repetition priming experiments ask whether speech inputs can link directly to abstract underlying representations, or whether access is mediated via intervening access representations of each words surface phonetic form. Experiment 1 showed that auditory-auditory priming between morphologically related derived/stem pairs (such as excitement/excite) was not affected by allomorphic variation in the phonetic form of the stem in prime and target (as in sanity/sane). Experiment 2 showed that interference effects between suffixed primes and targets sharing the same stem (as in excitement/excitable) were also unaffected by stem variation (as in sanity/sanely). These results, which cannot be attributed to either semantic or phonological factors, are problematic for mediated access theories and point to direct access from speech to abstract representations at the level of the lexical entry.

Morphology, modality, and lexical architecture

In thinking about how the human language system is organised to mediate the relationship between internally represented knowledge and the input and output systems dedicated to the access and use of this knowledge, it is natural to assume that the system has a considerable degree of functional and architectural symmetry. In current models of the organisation of the mental lexicon (e.g., Miceli 1994, Seidenberg 1995), we see diagrams very much like the one illustrated in Figure 1, with a central, modality-independent store of lexical content, and parallel sets of input lexica for the two principal modalities (speech and vision).

Pseudohomophone effects in processing Chinese compound words

The issue of how phonological information becomes available in reading Chinese and the role that it plays in lexical access was investigated for Chinese compound words, using pseudohomophone effects in lexical and phonological decision as a diagnostic tool. Pseudohomophones were created by replacing one or both constituents of two-character compound words with orthographically dissimilar homophonic characters. Experiment 1 found that mixed pseudohomophones sharing one constituent with their base words were more difficult to reject than control nonwords in lexical decision. Pure pseudohomophones sharing no constituents with their base words did not show this effect. Experiment 2 used mixed pseudohomophones and found an interaction between base word frequency and the frequency of constituent characters in determining pseudohomophone effects. Experiment 3 used a phonological decision task and found exceptionally poor performance for pure pseudohomophones. These results are interpreted in an interactive framework where the direct mapping from orthography to semantics is dominant and phonology plays a subsidiary role.

Prosodic boundaries delay the processing of upcoming lexical information during silent sentence reading

Prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing in both spoken and written sentence comprehension, but it is unknown whether the processing of prosodic boundaries affects the processing of upcoming lexical information. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants read silently sentences that allow for 2 possible syntactic interpretations when there is no comma or other cue specifying which interpretation should be taken. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a low-pass filtered auditory version of the sentence, which provided a prosodic boundary cue prior to each sentence. In Experiment 1, we found that the boundary cue helped syntactic disambiguation after the cue and led to longer fixation durations on regions right before the cue than on identical regions without prosodic boundary information. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a gaze-contingent display-change paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal visibility of the first constituent character of the target word after the disambiguating position. Results of Experiment 2 showed that previewing the first character significantly reduced the reading time of the target word, but this preview benefit was greatly reduced when the prosodic boundary cue was introduced at this position. In Experiment 3, instead of the acoustic cues, a visually presented comma was inserted at the disambiguating position in each sentence. Results showed that the comma effect on lexical processing was essentially the same as the effect of prosodic boundary cue. These findings demonstrate that processing a prosodic boundary could impair the processing of parafoveal information during sentence reading.

Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings

In two experiments, we examined the contribution of articulation-specific features to visual word recognition during the reading of Chinese. In spoken Standard Chinese, a syllable with a full tone can be tone-neutralized through sound weakening and pitch contour change, and there are two types of two-character compound words with respect to their articulation variation. One type requires articulation of a full tone for each constituent character, and the other requires a full- and a neutral-tone articulation for the first and second characters, respectively. Words of these two types with identical first characters were selected and embedded in sentences. Native speakers of Standard Chinese were recruited to read the sentences. In Experiment 1, the individual words of a sentence were presented serially at a fixed pace while event-related potentials were recorded. This resulted in less-negative N100 and anterior N250 amplitudes and in more-negative N400 amplitudes when targets contained a neutral tone. Complete sentences were visible in Experiment 2, and eye movements were recorded while participants read. Analyses of oculomotor activity revealed shorter viewing durations and fewer refixations on—and fewer regressive saccades to—target words when their second syllable was articulated with a neutral rather than a full tone. Together, the results indicate that readers represent articulation-specific word properties, that these representations are routinely activated early during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, and that the representations are also used during later stages of word processing.