Morphological decomposition in Chinese compound word recognition: Electrophysiological evidence

The present study examined the effect of both morphological complexity and semantic transparency in Chinese compound word recognition. Using a visual lexical decision task, our electrophysiological results showed that transparent and opaque compounds induced stronger Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) than monomorphemic words. This result suggests that Chinese compounds might be decomposed into their constituent morphemes at the lemma level, whereas monomorphemic words are accessed as a whole-word lemma directly from the form level. In addition, transparent and opaque compounds produced a similar N400 as each other, suggesting that transparency did not show an effect on the involvement of constituent morphemes during access to the wholeword lemma. Two behavioral experiments additionally showed similar patterns to the EEG results. These findings support morphological decomposition for compounds at the lemma level as proposed by the full-parsing model, and no evidence is found to support the role of transparency during Chinese compound word recognition.

Automated summary

The present study investigated the effect of morphological complexity and semantic transparency on Chinese compound word recognition. Electrophysiological results from a visual lexical decision task revealed that transparent and opaque compounds elicited a stronger Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) compared to monomorphemic words. This suggests that Chinese compounds may be decomposed into constituent morphemes at the lemma level, while monomorphemic words are accessed as whole-word lemmas directly from the form level. Additionally, both behavioral experiments showed similar patterns to the EEG results. These findings provide support for morphological decomposition of compounds at the lemma level as proposed by the full-parsing model, and no evidence was found to support the role of transparency in Chinese compound word recognition.