The AoA Effects In Chinese Two-Character Words With Different Semantic Transparency

The age when a person first acquires a word has been proven to be a determiner in the processing of that word. This effect of word learning age has been referred to as age of acquisition (AoA) effect. The standard AoA effect indicates an advantage for early-acquired words over late-acquired ones in lexical processing and has been found in different tasks across languages. Two hypotheses concerning the underlying mechanisms have stood the test of time and deserve further discussions. The semantic locus hypothesis proposes wider and stronger connections for words learned at an early age, hence the superiority in processing. Alternatively, the arbitrary mapping hypothesis attributes the effect to the inconsistency in mapping between the input and output. There have been few studies regarding AoA effect in the processing of Chinese two-character words. A further and finer division of two-character words is also needed. Considering semantic features, semantic transparency, which described the semantic relationship between the component characters and the whole word, was introduced into the present study for its weight in the mental representation of two-character words. More specifically, through the advanced online eye-tracking technology, the study was an attempt to explore the consistency of AoA effects in the processing of two-character words and to examine whether these effects were influenced by semantic transparency. A standard as well as a reverse AoA effect was observed. Nevertheless, no interaction was found between AoA effect and semantic transparency effect that appeared significant. AoA effect and semantic transparency effect emerged in word decoding and linguistic comprehension—two important elements of reading. With more semantic connections, the early-acquired words were inhibited to a greater degree by the following lowly predicable verbs in a specific syntactic structure than the late-acquired ones, hence the reverse AoA effect appeared. However, the inhibition would dwindle during the second fixation duration and the early-acquired words would show an advantage in this measure. As regards the semantic transparency effect, it existed in two phases of meaning integration from the target word to the whole sentence. To conclude, the study confirmed the existence of AoA effect in the processing of Chinese two-character words, be it a standard or a reverse effect. Besides,AoA effect and semantic transparency effect were independent of each other. Finally, semantic locus hypothesis was preferred as the theoretical account for AoA effect.