Interaction Between Semantic Representations Of Morphemes And Words In Chinese Two-Character Words

The role of morphology in the human language processing system has become an important topic of research in the cognitive psychology of language over the past a few decades. Some disagreements remain, such as whether the access of whole words before the access of morphemes; how morphological information is stored in long-term memory; what connection is there between morphemes and words, and so on. There are three lexical representation models in Chinese two-character words studies. The interactive-activation model (Taft & Zhu, 1997) and the multi-level cluster representation model (Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1995) both maintain that morphemes and words are represented at different levels, the activation of words is mediated by the activation of morpheme, and there is positive connection between morphemes and words. On the contrary, the theory postulated by Peng and his collaborators (inter/intra connection model,â…¡C model; Peng, Liu & Wang, 1998) claims that morphemes and words are represented at the same level, the access of whole words can be achieved directly from the visual information, and the connection between morphemes and words may be positive or negative depending on semantic transparency of words.Prior studies paid much attention on the effect of cumulative morpheme frequency (CMFE), or used the morphology repeat paradigm to study the role of morphology in visual word recognition. Few studies interested in the interaction between the meanings of morphemes and words. We adopted the semantic priming paradigm and manipulated the semantic transparency of words to investigate three problems: 1) whether the meanings of constituent morphemes are activated during the processing of Chinese two-character words; 2) whether the access of whole words before the access of morphemes; and 3) whether morphemic meanings and whole words' meanings interact with each other.In the first experiment, a semantic priming paradigm with lexical decision as the dependent variable was conducted, the compound words being the primes and the semantic associates of compound's opaque constituent morphemes being the targets, with the purpose of exploring whether there is the meanings activation of constituent morphemes during the processes of Chinese two-character words. Only low frequent compounds exhibited faciliatory priming effects. In the second experiment, we investigated whether there was semantic priming effect in transparent and opaque words at two short SOAs (50ms and 83ms), and found faciliatory semantic priming effect both in transparent words and in opaque words. In the last experiment, we compared the semantically transparent effect in the condition of whether the meanings of morpheme were inhibited or not. Results showed that semantically transparent effect disappeared when the meanings of morpheme were inhibited.Based on the results of these three experiments, we make the following conclusions:1) The meanings of constituent morphemes are activated in low frequent words but not in high frequent words.2) The access of whole words can be achieved directly from the visual representations, whatever they are high frequent words or low frequent words.3) In low frequent words, the meanings of constituent morphemes and the meanings of whole words interact with each other. If both of them are similar, they promoted mutually; if both of them were different, they interfered with each other.