Whole Words’ Semantic And Grammatical Priming Effect In The Early Processing Period Of Chinese Two-character Words

Recruiting the college students as subjects, the present study used masked priming lexical decision task (prime display duration=40ms) to explore the whole word’s semantic and grammatical representation of high-frequency and transparent Chinese two-character words.60 college students participated in experiment 1. For materials, the prime words (except for the controlled irrelevant words) and targets share the same initial ambiguous morpheme. After balancing the whole words’grammatical features such as the morphological structures, the word classes, frequency and transparency, results showed that in the dominant priming condition,the recognition of the targets was significantly accelerated compared with that in the controlled condition, but in the subordinate priming condition, there was no such significant priming effect.This result showed that whole words’semantic representations exist in the mental lexicon.In experiment 2, there were also 60 college students. After controlling the semantic relation and other variables between primes and targets, we further explored whether the grammatical information of morphological structure and the words’class will be processed in the early period of compound words’recognition. Results showed that whole words’morphological structure and word class could facilitate the recognition of the targets, meaning whole word’s grammatical information play a role in the early processing period of Chinese two-character words.Taken together, these two results demonstrated the modified lemma model (Crepaldi, Rastle,Coltheart, & Nickels,2010) can explain the early period of Chinese two-character words: there is an abstract intermediate lemma level between the form of the input and the functional output, capturing the correlation between them. Besides, words’semantic and grammatical information can be represented by the lemma unit.If the prime words and targets share the same semantic and grammatical properties, the presence of priming words will activate the lemma node and then facilitate the recognition of target words.