The Activation Of Morphemes In Chinese Disyllable Compound Words And Its Time Course

The research of psycholinguistics focus on the comprehension and production of language, however, though the latter kind of research is much less than the former one, it is the topic of general interest in recent years. The present study investigated the activation of morphemes in Chinese disyllable compound words and its time course,adopting the classical experimental method in language-production research------picture-word interference paradigm.There are three experiments in the present study. In Experiment One, we investigated the activation of morphemes in Chinese disyllable compound words and its time course for the first and second morpheme respectively, with four kinds of distractor words( morphological,orthographic,phonological and control)were presented in different SOA(-100nm,0ms,100ms) when the participants name the picture. In Experiment Two, we repeated the result of Experiment One with the same experiment design, only adding a factor of position and changing the SOA( -200ms,100ms). We also investigated the function of morpheme position in the Chinese disyllable compound words production in this experiment. In Experiment Three, we set a "semantic relative" prime to compare with the morphological prime, in order to investigate the semantic activation of morpheme in the Chinese disyllable compound words production, which confirmed the result of former two experiments but no salient semantic activation was found.In general, we can get the following conclusion under the condition of our study:â‘ Morphemes can be an encoding unit in the production of Chinesedisyllable compound words. â‘¡There are orthographic and phonological facilitative effects of morphemes inthe production of Chinese disyllable compound words, but no salient semanticeffect.â‘¢The position of the morphemes function no salient difference in theproduction of Chinese disyllable compound words.â‘£The time course of morpheme activation in Chinese disyllable compoundwords is simillar to the mono-syllable, with the orthographic activation in front(SOA= -200ms), then followed the phonological activation (SOA= 100ms). Theorthographic activation can last from SOA= -200ms to SOA=100ms, but thephonological activation only present at SOA=100ms.