Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Four experiments investigated the role of morphemes in the recognition of Chinese two-character words and its mutation in the time course of processing. In all of the experiments, semantic priming procedure was used and Chinese reversible words as primer. In Exp 1, it was found that the presentation of a reversible word can, when SOA is 157ms, facilitate not only the lexical decision of a target which has semantic relation with the reversible word, but also that of a target which has semantic relation with its reversed form. There was no difference of priming effects between the two conditions. In Exp 2 (SOA = 314ms) and Exp 3 (SOA = 57ms), the results showed that the presentation of a reversible word can significantly facilitate only the decision of one of its semantically related words, but not that of one which has semantical relation with its reversed form. These results were also obtained in Exp 4 which was controlled more strictly. Three points were concluded. First, the morpheme units played some roles in the recognition of words, but its activation was not a necessary stage. Second, in the process of recognition, the activation of morpheme units came through from weakness to strength, then to weakness gradually, while that of whole word units was constantly strengthened. Third, the information of the position of morphemes was processed later than that of morpheme units themselves.

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