Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

The effects of polysemy and word frequency in the identification of Chinese two-character word were explored in lexical decision and naming task. According to Modern Chinese Dictionary (1997), eighty ambiguous-unambiguous two-character word pairs were selected. The first character’s pronunciations of these word pairs were the same. Thirty subjects were asked to rate the number of meaning for these words. Based on the rating data, fifteen high-frequency ambiguous-unambiguous word pairs and fifteen low-frequency word pairs were created. In Experiment 1, thirty undergraduate students participated in the lexical decision experiment. They were asked to make a word-nonword discrimination for a stimulus appearing on the video monitor by pressing either the word or nonword key. The result showed: in the lexical decision task, there was a significant interaction between polysemy and frequency variables and the polysemy effects were present only for low-frequency words. In Experiment 2, twenty-six undergraduate students participated in the naming experiment. They were asked to name a word aloud as quickly and accurately as possible. The result showed: in the naming task, there was no polysemy effect both for higher-and lower-frequency words.

By analyzing the items, it was found that the difference of meaning number for high-frequency ambiguous-unambiguous words were less than for low-frequency ambiguous-unambiguous words. The less difference of meaning number for high-frequency ambiguous-unambiguous words may be the reason why there was no polysemy effect in the identification of high-frequency Chinese two-character words in lexical decision task.

In naming tasks, the null effects of polysemy may be explained as (1) the pronunciation of two-character words can begin at the moment of accessing the first character’s sound of two-character words. The characteristic of two-character word’s pronunciation resulted in the weak influence of semantic features on the retrieval of pronunciation of two-character words. (2) For the items, the first character’s pronunciations of ambiguous-unambiguous word pairs were the same. The same pronunciation of the first character may also result in the null effects of polysemy during the naming of Chinese two-character words.

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