| Compounding is an east and effective way to form and transfer new meanings by which existed words are combined;In psycholinguistics,these new words through compounding are called compound words,which tend to be extremely productive across languages(Libben,2006).Teapot,for example,is formed by compounding the words tea and pot.A number of studies have showed that readers could assess the morpheme information when processing compound words(Amenta & Crepaldi,2012).In addition,besides these two constituents,there is an implicit and essential relation which is called semantic relation between two morphemes,for example,the compound word “teapot” can be paraphrased as “a pot for tea”.Indeed,previous work on the process of compound word has suggested that such semantic relation involved in the processing of compound words(Gagné & Spalding,2004,2009;Ji & Gagné,2007).They found that participants responded faster when the prime and target shared the same relation than when the prime and target had a different semantic relation.Such priming effect is known as the(semantic)relation priming effect.However,the overall picture of mechanism of semantic relation priming effect,namely,this such effect is solely caused by the facilitation of same relation,the inhibition processing of different relation or both of them,is far from clear.In addition,the process of semantic relations entails not only inferring a possible semantic relation between the constituents,but also assigning those components to the appropriate semantic roles(Estes,2003;Wisniewski & Love,1998),that is,distinguishing which one is the modifier and which one is the head noun.Although this semantic role assignment process is essential and important theoretically,there is no corresponding empirical supporting evidence.Thus,the present study aims to explore the influence of semantic relation information on Chinese compound word processing,specially,1)the mechanism of semantic relation priming effect;2)whether or not semantic role assignment is essential for the activation of semantic relation between two components.In our experiment 1a,a one-way design was used to explore the mechanism of semantic relation priming effect.Three primes were produced for each target(e.g.,陶管,meaning pottery pipe):a same relation prime(e.g.,陶器,meaning earthenware),and a different relation prime(e.g.,陶土,meaning pottery clay),and a baseline prime(e.g.,陶,meaning pottery).Faster response was found in the same semantic relation condition relative to the different semantic relation condition and baseline condition,and the latter two condition did not differ.The design in EXP1b is identical to EXP1a except coordinative compound word(e.g.,陶瓷,meaning ceramics)was used as prime in baseline condition in EXP1b.Compared with monomorphemic words,adopting the coordinative compound as baseline has the following advantages:First,there is no apparent semantic relation between the constituents in coordinative compound words,thereby it could rule out the possibility of automatically activation of any semantic relation;2)Second,it could rule out the disruption from the differences between compound words and monomorphemic words;3)Third,the compound word in Chinese is composed of two Chinese characters with the same length,which can eliminate the possible interference of word length.Our results showed that the different semantic relation condition was significantly longer than the same semantic relation condition and baseline condition,and there was no significant difference between the latter two conditions.In sum,these two experiments have replicated the relation priming effect on compound words as previous studies.Critically,our experiment 1b indicates that the mechanism of relation priming effect is due to the increased processing difficulty caused by different relations with more suitable baseline stimulus and stringent control.Using boundary paradigm,the EXP2 was design to investigate whether or not semantic role assignment is essential for the activation of semantic relation.A 3(word type: simple word;coordinative compound;subordinate compound)× 3(preview condition: identical condition(ID);transposed condition(TC);unrelated condition(UN))within-subject design was adopted.We observed a main effect of preview type: fixation duration was longer in UN than TC and TC was longer than ID.This indicates that the order of characters in Chinese is somewhat flexible,although the order information is also important for word identification.More importantly,the two-way interaction between word type and preview condition was significant in GAZE and GO-PAST,also the same number trend in FFD,specially,the difference between the UN and TC condition(character-transposed effect)in subordinate compounds was smaller than in coordinative compounds and simple words,whereas the TL effect in the latter two conditions was similar,suggesting that character order encoding was more disruptive for subordinate transposed nonword than for coordinative transposed nonword and simple transposed nonword.This pattern of results then suggests that semantic role assignment does matter for semantic relation processing.To sum up,considering the uniqueness of Chinese compound words and adopting the character-transposed effect,this present study indicates that the mechanism of semantic relation priming effect is caused by the interference of different semantic relation.Furthermore,it is first proved that semantic role assignment is an indispensable process for the activation and use of semantic relations between the two constituents in compound words.Our results not only reveal the uniqueness of Chinese compound word processing,but also provide empirical support for the construction of a universal Chinese compound word processing model. |
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