Chinese New Two-Character Words Recognition

The close connection between the words and their constituents in Chinese two-character words(2C-words)recognition has been well-documented in psycholinguistics research.As a relatively particular part of speech in Chinese,new 2C-words cannot be represented in Mental Lexicon like common-used words,nor do they lack meaning as non-words.Hence,they have unique properties and processing advantages undoubtedly.This study mainly explored the recognition mechanism of Chinese new 2C-words through two experiments that used Chinese new 2C-words as experimental materials.In this study,fifty-two 2C-words were adopted as the critical materials of new words which were used in Taiwan but not popularized in other regions where Chinese is the mother language,and the frequency of left and right constituent characters of those words was manipulated.The Lexical Decision Task and Repeated Priming Lexical Decision Task were used to explore the influence of constituent characters’ frequency and neighbor words in the recognition of Chinese new 2C-words.In Experiment 1,the results revealed the frequency effect of constituent characters and proved the important role of the left character in recognition of Chinese new 2C-words.In Experiment 2A,the importance of the left character was discovered again.In Experiment 2B,the results revealed the processing superiority of the low-frequency characters’ information in Chinese new 2C-words recognition.Then the combined analysis of the mean ERR and mean RTs of Experiment 2A and Experiment 2B showed the process of competitive activation and automatic integration of constituent characters’ information and neighbor words’ information.Finally,the familiarity and semantic transparency of all new words were quantitatively analyzed,and the results indicated that the facilitation of neighbor words for Chinese new 2C-words recognition in Experiment 2B was not only caused by morphological overlap but also caused by semantic overlap.This study draws the following conclusions according to the two experiments and the quantitative analysis of all new 2C-words mentioned above.Firstly,Chinese new 2C-words are processed through constituent characters’ information,and the left character is relatively more important.Secondly,character frequency plays an important role in new word recognition,and low-frequency characters have significant processing superiority that can regulate the importance of the left character.Thirdly,the present study proves that the facilitation of common-used neighbor words in the recognition of Chinese new 2C-words is caused by morphological overlap and semantic overlap.Fourthly,there is a process of competitive activation and automatic integration of the characters’ and the common-used neighbor words’ information in the processing of Chinese new 2C-words.The Competitive Activation Model of Chinese new 2C-words recognition was proposed in this study,which provides new evidence for Chinese 2C-words recognition.In addition,this paper also provides new ideas in materials selection and a more scientific method for Chinese vocabulary learning.