The Processing Of Biased Ambiguous Morphemes In Chinese Compound Recognition

The importance of morphological processing in lexical recognition has been acknowledged in psycholinguistics over the past four decades.In Chinese,the majority of Chinese characters belong to morphemes,since the character shared a common orthographic representation might cover several different meanings,like “月 yue” represents “moon” and “month”.We define this kind of multi-meaning morpheme as ambiguous morpheme.To explore the huge number of ambiguous morphemes in Chinese,Tsang and Chen(2013)introduced the meaning dominance of ambiguous words into morphemic research,dividing Chinese ambiguous morphemes into semantic biased and balanced according to the relative usage of meaning frequency.The biased ambiguous morpheme has one meaning which shows more dominant than other meanings.In general,we consider the meaning in higher using frequency as dominant one,another meaning manifesting lower frequency as subordinate one.Most previous studies about processing of ambiguous morphemes focused on morphemic frequency have underlined the role of morpho-orthographic representation but ignored morphemic semantics in early decomposition.Additionally,there remains questions in different results because of the absence comparing the discrepancy of meaning frequency to activate morphemic semantics for some relative researches.In current study,we employed the masked priming paradigm which priming words were presented rapidly in unconsciousness.Therefore,conparing the difference between priming effects of critical morpheme in prime-target word pairs could reflect influence of morphemic semantics in early processing.This study examined the processing of ambiguous morphemes in Chinese word recognition with a masked priming lexical decision task.Both behavioral and event-related potential(ERP)were recorded.All targets were bimorphemic compound words that contained ambiguous morphemes as the first morphemes.The ambiguous morphemes either took the dominant or subordinate interpretation,depending on the second morphemes.The prime words contained the same ambiguous morphemes in the dominant interpretation,the subordinate interpretation,or were unrelated to the targets.Analyses on response times revealed significant facilitating priming whenever primes and targets shared morphemes,but the strength of facilitation was stronger when the morpheme meanings were consistent.A similar pattern was found in the analyses of N400(300-500 ms after target onset)amplitudes.However,in the earlier N250 time window(200-300 ms after target onset),only the dominant targets,but not the subordinate ones,were primed by the morpheme-sharing primes.More importantly,the strength of facilitation was similar between the dominant and subordinate primes.The ERP results accurately revealed that the biased ambiguous morphemes could be semantically activated in both early and late stages of lexical recognition,meanwhile this activation was affected by meaning frequency.The study confirmed that morpho-orthography play a crucial effect in whole word process.