Morphological decomposition in Chinese compound word recognition: Electrophysiological evidence
Yanjun Wei, Ying Niu, Marcus Taft, Manuel Carreiras, Morphological decomposition in Chinese compound word recognition: Electrophysiological evidence, Brain and Language, Volume 241, 2023, 105267, ISSN 0093-934X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2023.105267
Brain and Language
Brain and Language
Abstract
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 whole-
word lemma. Two behavioral experiments additionally showed similar patterns to the EEG results. These find-
ings 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.