Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Using a repetition priming paradigm the present study investigated into the identification of Chinese two-character words. 32 compound words and 32 binding words were used as target. The prime followed by a pattern mask was either a constituent of a two-character word, or a word itself. The results showed that identification of the target was facilitated by the prime under the backward priming condition, Facilitation effects for the constituent primed and the whole word-primed were equally large. The binding word 1 (the token frequency of its constituent is more than 1) were found to take longer to recognize than the compound words, but the surprising finding was that lexical decisions were significantly faster for the binding word 2 (the token frequency of its constituent is 1) than for the compound words. The results also showed that both the compound words and the binding words 1 have significant position effects. The subject recognized the word in which its first constituent was as prime significantly faster than the word in which its second constituent was as prime. There was no significant difference between transparent compound words and opaque compound words. The results suggest that representations of Chinese two-character words are stored in morphemic form.

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