Processing Chinese Morphology.pdfVIP

Processing Chinese Morphology: The Representation of Morphemes in Mono-Morphemic Non-Binding Words Yu-da, Lai Institute of Linguistics at National Chung Cheng University December, 2000 Abstract This study explores the representation of morphemes in mono-morphemic non-binding words. The experiment is divided into two parts--one to replicate Taft Zhus first experiment on morphemes in mono-morphemic binding words, and the other on those in mono-morphemic non-binding words, in order to compare how the two different categories of words represent in our mental lexicon. Results of the experiment shows that RTs for the 1st-position character is no faster than the 2nd-position character in MNBW words. This tells us that morphemes have their own representation in the morpheme level in mental lexicon if they are strong enough, i.e. occur enough. Introduction To access or retrieve lexical information from mental lexicon is affected by many factors, such as frequency effect, priming effect, semantic transparency factor, and morphological structures. Among the factors, this paper focuses on how morphological structure behaves and what the role it plays during the process of accessing lexical information of Chinese words. Before we get into the main focus of this study, a brief introduction to Chinese morphological structure is needed. Here the notion of “word” in Chinese is defined as 詞ci which is composed of two characters, here defined as 字zi in order to avoid the cont