ERIC Number: EJ1112051
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Oct
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0090-6905
EISSN: N/A
There Is Something about Grammatical Category in Chinese Visual Word Recognition
Kwong, Oi Yee
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v45 n5 p1067-1087 Oct 2016
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.
Descriptors: Chinese, Nouns, Verbs, Pronunciation, Semantics, Syntax, Morphology (Languages), Language Processing, Word Recognition, Visual Perception
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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Authoring Institution: N/A
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