The Activation Of Chinese Word-class Information During Speech Production

At present there' s no consistent view on the differencesof different word classes during lexical processing, so it isnecessary to study further. How are Chinese nouns and verbsprocessed in speech production? How are Chinese nouns andverbs represented in mental lexicon? Exploring these questionswill enrich Chinese cognitive theories, delineate theparticularity of Chinese language and Chinese cognition, andbe beneficial to clear the relationship between the general andspecific character of language.This study employed picture-word interference paradigm, taking the relationship between interference words and targetwords as operant variable, to explore the informationprocessing of different Chinese word-class in the speechproduction. Further according to the different effects ofinterference words on the picture naming under the differentSOA conditions, separation of grammatical and semantic featureswas further explored in order to infer the relative time courseof Chinese word-class processing in the speech production.Experiment 1 investigated the word-class informationprocessing course of single word generation in spoken languages. Based on Experiment 1, Experiment 2 emphasized grammaticalfeatures in naming task and investigated the informationarousal during noun phrases generation. Experiment 3investigated the information processing of simple declarativestatement generation. The results of three experimentsindicate: word-class interference effects exist in singlewords production, noun phrases production and simpledeclarative statement and the interference of nouns is robusterthan that of non-nouns. There' s overlap between semanticinterference and word-class interference in time window. Theresults incline to support the interactive activation theoryon time course of lexical processing.