Morphology, orthography, and phonology in reading Chinese compound words

The interaction between morphological, orthographic, and phonological information in reading Chinese compound words was investigated in five sets of experiments, using both masked priming and visual-visual priming lexical decision tasks. Words sharing common morphemes were consistently found to facilitate each other, although the priming effects were modulated by spatial overlap of orthographic forms in masked priming. Priming effects were also found for words having homographic-homophonic characters, but the effect tended to be inhibitory when the SOA between primes and targets was long and when the competing morphemes corresponding to the characters were at the initial constituent position of primes and targets. Priming effects between words having homographic but non-homophonic characters were more inhibitory, compared with effects between words having homographic-homophonic characters. Words having orthographically different homophonic morphemes did not prime each other throughout the experiments. The results were discussed in terms of how lexical representations incorporate morphological structure and how morphological, orthographic, and phonological information interacts in constraining semantic activation of constituent morphemes and compound words.