The Influence Of The Morphemes' Frequence On The Recognize Of The Compound Words

Morpheme is defined as the smallest unite that can distinguish syntax. The morpheme had been widely researched by language psychologists since Taft and Forster introduced it into the research of the linguistic psychology in 1975.Taft and Forster hold that the compound words in English is recognized after the stem in the access representation has been accessed. Zhang and Peng's research on the morpheme effect of the Chinese compound word indicate that the morpheme level indeed exist in the process of the Chinese compound word. The paratactic compound word and the partially compound word are recognized by accessing the mepheme. Cole's research found that the compound words are storaged in the form of whole word in the mental lexicon, the structure of the morpheme is influenced by the organization of the morphemes' family. Caramazza think that in the level of access representation, there are either whole word representation or morpheme representation; the items are activated by each other, the one which first achieve the threshold will be activated first.The purpose of the research: (1) what is the unit of the compound words' represent, the whole word or the morpheme; (2) what is the role of the morpheme in the compound words' represent, at which stage of the process the morpheme take effect.Previous research often use the lexical decision paradigm and the naming paradigm to explord the role of the morpheme in the compound word process, Although both paradigm also can explain some problems,the degree of processing in those two tasks is comparatively inferior, and they can not be used to explain the time course of the morpheme in the process of the compound words.Therfore, besides the lexical decision paradigm and the naming paradigm, we also use the sentence reading task to research how morpheme influence the recognize the compound words.The experiment 1 and experiment 2, by control the word frequency of the first morpheme and the second morpheme, we using the lexical decision paradigm and the naming paradigm respectively to explord how they influence the compound word process, and infer how was the compound words storaged in the mental lexicon. Experiment 3 adopted sentence reading paradigm, by analysing the participants' eye tracking index, explore how the first morpheme and the second morpheme influence the recognize of the compound words. The conclusion of the research are as follows:(1)the compound words in Chinese was represented in the form of morpheme, the word frequency of the morpheme influence the compound words' recognize.(2) the relevance of the morpheme' semantic and the whole words' semantic influence the process, the first morpheme's word frequency mainly influence the left-head words and the second morpheme mainly influence the right-head words.(3)The morpheme effect was found no matter in single word task or in sentence reading task.