Chinese Two-Character-Word Recognition During Sentence Comprehension

Most commonly used words are two-character words(2C words)in modern Chinese.Two-character-word(2C-word)recognition is an important topic in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.With the purpose of investigating the recognition of 2C words,two experiments were conducted by using cross-modal lexical decision task(CMLD).Fifteen 2C words were used whose transposed forms are also commonly used words.Each 2C word was collocated with a number word and a classifier to construct classifier-noun collocation structure,which was embedded in a sentence.Two experiments were conducted in each of which a 3(CONDITION: Noun,the transposed word(noun(T))or control word(noun(C)))× 2(WORD: word or non-word homophone)factorial of repeated measurements was adopted.The dependent variables were reaction time(RT)and error rate.The two experiments adopted the same critical sentences.In Experiment 1,the syntactic structure of the fillers was different from the critical sentences.In Experiment 2,however,the fillers were similar to the critical sentences in syntactic structure.Participants were required to listen to the first part of a sentence.When they had heard the classifier and were about to hear the noun of classifier-noun collocation,the recording stopped and a target was visually presented on a computer screen,which was the noun of classifier-noun collocation,noun(T),noun(C)or a non-word homophone of the noun,noun(T)or noun(C).Participants were required to make a lexical decision response as to whether or not the target was a meaningful word by pressing one of two pre-designated keys.In Experiment 1,participants performed more poorly on the Noun(T)s and Noun(C)s than on the Nouns.And there was no significant difference between the Noun(T)s and the Noun(C)s in RTs.In Experiment 2,participants also had shorter RTs for the Nouns than for the corresponding non-word homophones.But they had shorter RTs for the Nouns than for the corresponding non-word homophones.Also the participants’ RTs were significantly shorter in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2.It was concluded that participants mainly took the visually presented 2C targets as whole entities.At the same time,they also tended to recognize the targets as a whole phonologically to a certain extent in an audio form of sentential context.In sentence reading,context and prediction played an important role in affecting the processing of 2C words.In addition,repetition of the similar syntactic context may also affect the efficiency of 2C-word recognition.The present study added new evidence from CMLD task under the sentential context,and revealed a theoretical model of 2C words processing in natural languages,in which the influences are taken into consideration of orthographical and phonological information and of the sentential context.In addition,this study was supposed to serve as a reference for Chinese vocabulary learning and teaching.