The Grammatical Category Effect In Recog Nition Of Chinese Disyllabic Compounds

Grammatical category effect means that the progress of target words was influenced by the related grammatical interferences. The reseaechers regard as the automatic activtion of grammar during the words progress. In the picture-word interference paradigm,picture naming was faster when picture name and distractor word had the same grammar(e.g.,bag-car) as compared with a difference in grammar(e.g.,bag-study).Since the discovery of grammatical category effect, the researchers studied it by transforming the language,the attributes of the grammar, SOA and the tasks of the experiment.In view of the feature of Chinese compound words, this study explored if there is grammatical category effect in the progress of Chinese disyllabic compound words or not with the category decision task.We used the noun+noun (NN,e.g., TIAN ZAI, which mens"natural disaster"). noun+verb(NV,e.g.,FA JIA, which mens"hairpin")、verb+noun(VN,e.g.,JIANG SHI, which means "lecturer") as target words to investigate the activition of grammar and the grammatical category effect.Participants are instructed to press two buttons in a device to decide that if the targets is a noun or not.The results showed that the RTs of the NN nouns is the showest,the VN nouns is the second and the NV nouns is the longest. Because the materials of the experiment are subordinates,the second morpheme indicates the main meaning of the word.whereas the first morpheme modifies the second morpheme.The second morpheme’s grammar of the NN、VN nouns is coincident with the whole word,this facilitate the progress of the target. However, the NV nouns is the opposite. The result indicates that grammatical category effect of Chinese disyllabic nouns is exist.Reviewing ERP studies on grammatical category effect of whole word,we found,because Chinese disyllabic compounds are consist of several morpheme,so ERP components can not be compared,and how the neural mechanisms of separation was,were not researched.The study2,4 studied neural mechanisms of grammatical effect of morpheme,using the same materials as study 1,3.The results showed that under grammatical decision task,NN nouns earlier sparked N400 and LPC than NV and VN nouns,and the amplitude of LPC under the condition of NN nouns was significantly greater than NV and VN nouns.But under lexical decision task,under the condition of NN nouns was significantly greater than VN nouns,and the amplitude of LPC under the condition of VN nouns was significantly greater than NN nouns.That is to say,the separation of nouns and verbs morpheme occurred in 200ms after stimulus presentation,and the separation lasted until the end of processing.