Chinese Adjective-noun Structure Recognition And Processing In Sentence Context

Sentence reading hierarchical processing has been an important topic in the field of language cognition.In narrow sense,sentence reading processing refers to the process of encoding and extracting meaning from lexical information in the mental lexicon,which can be divided into two stages: early recognition processing and late logical integration.The adjective-noun structure is an important form of word combination and has been regarded as a bridge between lexicography and syntax.In this experiment,we took the adjective-noun structure as the carrier and placed the structure in the sentence context.Through manipulating the word order and collocation rationality,we managed to integrate influencing factors from two aspects so as to investigate the recognition and processing mechanism of adjective-noun structure composed of Chinese two-character words in the sentence reading.The study adopted a self-paced reading(SPR)behavioral experiment task in which the adjective-noun structure was placed in a sentence context.Experiment A was a 2(adjective word order: whole word adjective,reverse-order non-word adjective)×2(collocation rationality:proper collocation,improper collocation)factorial repeated measurement design.Experiment B was a 2(noun word order: whole word noun,reverse-order non-word noun)× 2(collocation rationality: proper collocation,improper collocation)factorial repeated measurement design.In both two experiments above,dependent variables are reaction time(RT)for each segment and error rate(ER)of the “yes” or “no” question in each task.The results showed that the participants had rates of 93.6% and 93.0% in correctly answer the reading comprehension questions in Experiments A and B,respectively,which meant all the participants focused on the experiments.As for the reaction times(RTs),in both Experiment A and B,the participants’ reading times to the words of interest didn’t seem to be influenced to the same extent by the manipulated variables.Taken the target sentence“zhe jia / gong si / ping jie/xiong hou / de / shi li,/ ying de le / zhe chang / jing biao”(This company won this competition due to their considerate strength)as the example,in Experiment A,the main effect of order was significant to the seventh(de)and eighth word(shi li)and the main effect of collocation was also significant from the eighth word(shi li)to the sentence-ending words.Through the analysis of participants’ raw-error scores to the reading comprehension questions,we found that the main effect of collocation was significant.In Experiment B,we observed that the main effect of order was significant to the ninth(ying de le)and tenth word(zhe chang),while the main effect of collocation was significant from the ninth word(ying de le)to the sentence-ending words.In answering the reading comprehension questions,the main effect was significant for collocation in the response errors.The conclusion of the study can be drawn as follows.As for Chinese adjective-noun structure’s comprehension into a context,there are two main stages,early word recognition an late logical integration.Two variables conducted in the study were shown to make effect in different time.The word order mainly affects the process of recognition and has short influence on one or two word in the target sentence,while the collocation rationality had an impact on the logical integration,which was a continuous impact till the ending parts of target sentences.From the experimental results,the subjects began to integrate the structure as an overall semantic structure only after the lexical level processing was completed.When the emergent noun violated the subjects’ previous semantic expectations for the adjective,that was the condition “improper collocation” in the study,its processing difficulty increased and more attention resources needed to be allocated to resolve this conflict.The above findings corroborated the two-stage theory of sentence reading from previous studies,and at the same time provided empirical evidence for the studies of processing of Chinese adjective-noun structures.