A Study On Representational And Morpheme Position Priority In Auditory Chinese Compound Word Processing

In the research of modern Chinese morphology,compounding is the most important and representative way to construct words.For a Chinese compound word,it is composed of two root morphemes.In terms of morphological structure,the relation between morphemes in Chinese compound words(CCWs for short)is both more semantically and syntactically complicated than in alphabetical languages like English.In terms of word-formation constituents,CCWs’ constituents can be both free and bound morphemes,and they are closely related to the most basic word-formation unit "character".The dissertation employed a passive Oddball paradigm to investigate the online auditory processing mechanism of CCWs,to explore the representational priority effect(decompositional representation vs.whole-word representation)and the morpheme position priority effect(beginning position vs.ending position)in the auditory modality.To achieve the research objective,the dissertation has performed two researches.Research One consists of two ERPs experiments,in which Chinese native speakers and Chinese as a Foreign Language learners(CFL learners for short)were recruited to explore the priority of two kinds of representation in CCWs processing.Research Two consists of three ERPs experiments,which explored the morpheme position priority effect in high-transparent compound words,low-transparent compound words,and two-character mono-morpheme words.Based on the results,we have constructed a cognitive and neural mechanism model of auditory CCWs to describe and explain the way CCWs are processed and the related neural mechanism.We also included the results of CFL learners’ representational priority effect and two-character mono-morpheme words’ constituent position priority effect as comparisons.Research One explored the representational priority effect of Chinese compound words,which mainly refers to whether there is a difference between the priority of the decompositional representation and the whole-word representation of CCWs in word processing.According to the experiment,high-transparent compound words activate both decompositional representation and whole-word representation,but whole-word representation is slightly more important;low-transparent compound words also activate both kinds of representation,but the two are balanced in importance.The corresponding EEG components at this stage include P50,N50,MMN(Mismatch Negativity),and P150.For CFL learners,the whole-word representation is of absolute priority at the access stage.N50 and MMN have been found at this stage.At the integration stage,high-transparent compound words still activate both decompositional representation and whole-word representation,but whole-word representation is slightly more important;low-transparent compound words show the absolute priority of the decompositional representation.The corresponding EEG components at this stage are N400 and P600.As for CFL learners,the decompositional representation and the whole-word representation in the integration stage are activated together,with a slight priority on the whole-word representation.Research Two explored the morpheme position priority effect,which refers to whether there is a difference between the importance of the beginning morpheme and that of the ending morpheme.At the access stage,both high-transparent and low-transparent compound words show the priority of the ending position,but compound words of varying transparency show a slight difference.For two-character mono-morpheme words,there is no difference between the beginning and ending constituent,which means that this kind of words are accessed by whole-word representation.The corresponding EEG components at the stage are MMN and P150.At the integration stage,high-transparent and low-transparent compound words still show the beginning morpheme priority effect,while two-character mono-morpheme words change from no priority effect to ending morpheme effect.The corresponding EEG components are N400 and P600.Based on the above two researches,we have constructed a cognitive neural mechanism model of the auditory processing of CCWs,which offers answers to the issue of representational priority and that of morpheme position priority.The model may not only describe the processing mechanism of different groups but also explain how different types of words are processed.In the future,it can also be applied to the fields like computational modeling,clinical diagnosis,Chinese language teaching,Chinese as a foreign language teaching,and some other fields.In addition,this study systematically uses the passive Oddball paradigm to explore the characteristics of Chinese words,which proves the validity of this research method in Chinese psycholinguistic research.