Morphological Structure in the Chinese Mental Lexicon

This paper investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. A series of 12 experiments, all using disyllabic compounds in a variety of auditory-auditory priming tasks, contrast the effects of four different types of prime-target relationship (identical, morphological, homophonic, homographic), while varying the constituent position of the related syllables in primes and targets. These priming effects were evaluated both in paired priming tasks, with a 150-msec inter-stimulus interval (ISI) between prime and target, and in delayed repetition tasks, using short, medium and long lags (intervening items ranging from 1 to 40). The results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model).