Abstract
The cognitive development of visual behavior categories has been proceeding from the simple to the complex and from the concrete to the abstract. Reflected on the language level, it has caused the word form transformations of visual verbs in Chinese. The transformation includes the creation of compound characters and compound words. In Old Chinese, producing new compound characters based on 目[mu](eye) is the best way to reflect the complication of visual behavior categories. The rich visual characters and their explanations in Shuo Wen Jie Zi show that the ancient ancestors’ cognitive maturity of visual behavior categories is high. The main way to record the development of visual behavior categories is generating new compound words. Through studying the internal structures, semantic relationships between morphemes and significant features of 153 compound verbs related 看[kan](look), we found that the word-formation abilities of those core morphemes are unequal because they have different stylistic features. And the compound verbs sharing one visual morpheme have the same significant features which could be used to distinguish the synonyms in the visual verb group.
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