Abstract
In two eye-tracking studies, reading of two-character Chinese compound words was examined. First and second character frequency were orthogonally manipulated to examine the extent to which Chinese compound words are processed via the component characters. In Experiment 1, first and second character frequency were manipulated for frequent compound words, whereas in Experiment 2 it was done for infrequent compound words. Fixation time and skipping probability for the first and second character were affected by its frequency in neither experiment, nor in their pooled analysis. Yet, in Experiment 2 fixations on the second character were longer when a high-frequency character was presented as the first character compared with when a low-frequency character was presented as the first character. This reversed character frequency effect reflects a morphological family size effect and is explained by the constraint hypothesis, according to which fixation time on the second component of two-component compound words is shorter when its identity is constrained by the first component. It is concluded that frequent Chinese compound words are processed holistically, whereas with infrequent compound words there is some room for the characters to play a role in the identification process.
Highlights
Words formed by combining two or more words to make compound words exist in many different languages (Libben, 2006)
In Experiment 1, we adopted the eye-tracking technology to investigate the processing of two-character compounds in Chinese reading by manipulating character frequency for the first and second character, while controlling for whole-word frequency
The fixation time results of Experiment 1 are consistent with the holistic processing model (Butterworth, 1983), which assumes compound words to be processed as single recognition units
Summary
Words formed by combining two or more words to make compound words (e.g., football) exist in many different languages (Libben, 2006). Roelofs (1996) used an implicit priming paradigm to investigate compound words processing in Dutch He manipulated the frequency of the second constituent (e.g., schuimkop “spume” vs schuimspaan “skimmer”) while sharing the first constituent within the word pairs and matching for the word frequency. Constituent frequency effects have been obtained in normal reading by using eye movement technology (for a review, see Hyönä, 2015) In these studies, the target compound words are embedded in sentences, not in isolation, as is typically the case in priming and lexical decision studies. Hyönä and Pollatsek (1998) investigated Finnish compound word (on average about 13 letters) processing They manipulated the frequency of the first constituent while matching for the second constituent frequency and word frequency. Access to the two latter representations is assumed to take place in parallel
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