Auditory Lexical Access of Chinese Monomorphemic Compounds

This work explores the lexical access of monomorphemic compounds and the role of Chinese orthography during spoken word recognition. In traditional Chinese linguistics, a compound is a word written with two or more characters whether or not they are morphemic. A monomorphemic compound may either be a binding word, written with characters that only appear in this one word or a nonbinding word, written with characters that are chosen for their pronunciation but that also appear in other words. To understand whether the purely orthographic difference would affect auditory lexical access, we conducted a series of five experiments. An auditory LDT found an orthographic effect: binding words were recognized more quickly than nonbinding words. In an auditory naming task, this effect disappeared, implying that the effect was localized to the decision component. An effect also failed to be found in a visual LDT with the same materials, implying that the orthographic effect in auditory lexical access involved the influence of cross-character predictability without the activation of orthographic representations. The hypothesis was later confirmed in the cross-modal LDT and the priming task.