The Whole-Word Processing And Component Processing In Chinese Idioms

The main purpose of this study is to explore the whole-word processing and component processing in Chinese idioms by using idioms as main stimuli in the study. Idiom is a specific linguistic unit that normally contains more than two words. The idioms used in the study include two different types, which were4-character idioms and3-character idioms. The two different types of idioms share the general property of idioms, which is, having the figurative meaning, which can express the meaning of the whole-idiom, and the literal meaning, which can express the meaning of the component of the idiom at the same time. There are also differences between these two types of idiom, the most important characteristic of which is, the linguistic structure of the4-character idioms is more compacted. Whist, the3-character idioms are more suitable for the psycholinguistic experiments due to its property of better control (for example, comparing with normal phrases).4-character idioms were used in the first study, and then3-character idioms were used in the second study. Two main questions were answered in the study:First of all, are there both whole-word processing and component processing in the idioms? Second, whether the compactness of the linguistic structure of the idiom will influence the whole-word and component processing in the idioms?Experiment1investigated these two questions by using the naming task. The repeated and unrelated priming of the final character were applied into both four-character idiom and compared normal phrases. The result showed that, idioms were named faster than normal phrases; naming reaction time was also faster in the repeated priming condition than the unrelated condition. Prime effect was larger in the idioms than in the phrases.Experiment2investigated the same questions by embedding the idioms in the sentences. Three different types of prime were used in this experiment, which were, semantic prime that related to the figurative meaning of the idiom, semantic prime which related to the literal meaning of the final character in the idiom, unrelated prime. Results showed that both semantic primes primed the idioms, caused shorter go path time in the fixations of whole-idioms.The component processing in the idioms was showed in Experiment1and2by priming the last character in the idiom, as well as the whole-word processing, indicated by the more efficient processing in idioms comparing to phrases (Experiment1), and the figurative meaning priming (Experiment2). Results of the first two experiments indicated the fitness of the hybrid hypothesis in idiom processing.The influence of transparency on the processing of idioms was tested in Experiment3. The paired transparent and opaque idioms were embedded in the same fragments of sentences. Results showed null effect of transparency, which was against to the assumptions of hybrid hypothesis.To answer the question of whether there are whole-word processing and component processing in3-character idiom, the Study2observed the word n+2effect in both3-character idioms and matched phrases.The observation of word n+2preview benefit in Chinese has some constraints, which are word n+2preview benefit only showed when word n+1was a high frequency character, so that when word n+1was a low frequency character, there would be no effect for the preview of word n+2. By using the selected version of stimuli from Yang et al.’s study (2009,2012), the result was replicated except in the analysis of the combined region of word n+1and word n+2, which showed a word n+2preview effect in gaze duration, even when word n+1was a low frequency character.Experiment5investigated the whole-word and component processing in3-character idioms by observing the n+2preview benefit in both3-character idioms and well-matched phrases, when word n+1was a low-frequency character. The valid n+2preview benefit from both idioms and phrases were showed in all fixation measures in the combined region, also on single fixation duration and gaze duration in region of word n+2, which indicating a similar processing of3-character idioms to normal phrases. However, idioms were marginally processed faster than idioms on gaze duration and go past time in combine region.To summarize, there are whole-word processing and component processing in both types of idioms. Comparing to the semantic related factors (i.e. semantic transparency), the compactness of the structure of idioms is more influencial on processing in idioms. The results from the study were partly support the assumptions of hybrid hypothesis and configurative hypothesis in idiom processing.