Words, Morphemes and Syllables in the Chinese Mental Lexicon

This research uses the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. In three experiments, subjects made lexical decision responses to spoken disyllabic words and nonwords. In Experiment 1, word frequency, morpheme frequency and syllable frequency were covaried, with either the first or second constituent of the compound held constant. Only word-frequency effects were found for real words, although responses were slower to nonwords with high-frequency initial syllables. The results for real words were replicated in Experiment 2, where syllable and morpheme frequency were varied for pairs of words sharing common morphemes in first or second position. Experiment 3, however, showed that when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. Experiment 3 also verified that syllable frequency effects for nonwords cannot be reliably obtained for second constituent contrasts. These effects were attributed to competition between homophonic morphemes. The overall results were interpreted in terms of a multi-level cluster model, with separate syllabic, morphemic and whole-word levels of representation.