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There is Something About Grammatical Category in Chinese Visual Word Recognition

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research volume 45, pages 1067–1087 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

The differential processing of nouns and verbs has been attributed to a combination of morphological, syntactic and semantic factors which are often intertwined with other general lexical properties. This study tested the noun–verb difference with Chinese disyllabic words controlled on various lexical parameters. As Chinese words are free from inflectional morphology, any psychological distinction observed for nouns and verbs could be more convincingly attributed to syntactic factors echoing their linguistic distinction. Comparison among nouns, verbs and adjectives in lexical decision showed that nouns were processed faster than both verbs and adjectives, while the latter two classes, which are syntactically similar in Chinese, did not show any significant difference. The noun advantage over verbs was consistently found even when the classical frequency effect was duly considered. Thus the noun–verb distinction apparently surfaces at an early stage of lexical processing, and it is suggested that nouns may have a higher base activation level as they are linguistically less complex, which makes their access relatively more facilitated than verbs.

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Notes

  1. In view of the universality of word classes, Kemmerer and Eggleston (2010) suggested that the correspondence between their linguistic and neurobiological architecture should be more finely discussed with reference to linguistic typology.

  2. The slashes indicate word boundaries.

  3. The Chinese stimuli are listed with their phonetic transcription in Jyutping, a transcription system developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong for Cantonese pronunciations, and an English gloss.

  4. The lists issued by the Hong Kong government recommend the Chinese vocabulary items to be learned by primary school students, during Stage 1 (primary 1 to primary 3) and Stage 2 (primary 4 to primary 6). For the current investigation, we approximate the age of acquisition by means of 1 and 2 respectively according to the lists, and items not found were labelled 3, assuming they are learned at an even later age.

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Acknowledgments

The experiments reported in this paper were done when the author was affiliated to the City University of Hong Kong, with grant support gratefully received from CityU (Project No. 7002798).

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong

    Oi Yee Kwong

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  1. Oi Yee Kwong
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Correspondence to Oi Yee Kwong.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Stimuli for Experiment 1
Full size table

Appendix 2

See Table 7.

Table 7 Stimuli for Experiment 2
Full size table

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Kwong, O.Y. There is Something About Grammatical Category in Chinese Visual Word Recognition. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 1067–1087 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9392-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9392-0

Keywords

  • Grammatical category
  • Noun advantage
  • Lexical decision
  • Chinese disyllabic words
  • Frequency effect