To combine is to divide: Evidence of the noun-verb distinction at the morphemic level in compound nouns

Abstract

Research has shown that nouns and verbs exhibit distinctive processing patterns. It remains unclear if the noun–verb distinction is driven by semantic or grammatical differences. The present study investigated the mechanism of noun–verb distinction in Chinese, which has a simple morphological system. Participants made grammatical class judgments on two types of compound nouns in Experiment 1—NN (nominal + nominal morphemes) and VN (verbal + nominal morphemes). The shorter RTs elicited by low frequency NN nouns than those of VN nouns suggest a facilitatory effect of morpheme type. In Experiment 2, preceding contexts for NN and VN were added in an acceptability judgment task to rule out the impact from context. Results showed that the processing of NN conferred a marginal advantage over that of VN, though the underlying source of this marginal NN-VN difference remains undetermined. Experiment 3 therefore pitted semantic versus grammatical class against each other by manipulating the congruency of semantic and syntactic relations between the first morpheme of a compound and its preceding context. Results showed that low frequency NN were processed more easily when the preceding context primed a nominal morpheme both semantically and syntactically than other conditions. Together, these results indicate that the noun–verb distinction in Chinese exists at the sublexical morphemic level and reveal for the first time that such sublexical noun–verb distinction is due to semantic rather than grammatical differences.