Search

Neighborhood frequency is a crucial variable to know the nature of word recognition. Different from alphabetic scripts, neighborhood frequency in Chinese is usually confounded by component character frequency and neighborhood size. Three experiments were designed to explore the role of the neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese and the stimuli were all two-character words. This effect was evaluated on targets with- and without-higher frequency neighbors with neighborhood size matched. Among the experiments, the patterns of the leading character frequency effect and word frequency effect in the naming and lexical decision tasks were compared. The results implied an inhibitory neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese word recognition. Accordingly, a possible cognitive mechanism of the neighborhood frequency effect was thus proposed.

Previous studies about the orthographic neighborhood size (NS) in Chinese have overlooked the morphological processing, and the co-variation between the character frequency and the the NS. The present study manipulated the word frequency and the NS simultaneously, with the leading character frequency controlled, to explore their influences on word lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2). The results showed a robust effect that words with a larger NS produced shorter reaction time than those with a smaller NS, irrespective of the word frequency and the tasks. This facilitative effect may occur due to a semantic network formed by neighbor words, resulting in the semantic activation to accelerate the word recognition. Moreover, the comparison of the effect sizes of word frequency between the two tasks showed that lexical decision responses demonstrated a larger word frequency effect, indicating that the sub-word processing was involved in the multi-character word recognition.

Three reading-time experiments in Chinese are reported that test contrasting views of how pronominal coreference is achieved. On the one hand, studies of reading time and eye tracking suggest that reduced expressions, such as the pronoun he, serve as critical links to integrate separate utterances into a coherent model of discourse. On the other hand, probe-word recognition studies indicate that full anaphoric expressions, such as a repeated name, are more readily interpreted than reduced expressions due to their rich lexical information, which provides effective cues to match the representation of the appropriate referent in memory. The results indicate that the ease of integrating the critical referent into a model of discourse is a function of the congruence of lexical, semantic, and discourse features conveyed by a syntactically prominent reduced expression within linguistic input. This pattern supports the view that a reduced expression is interpreted on-line and indeed plays a critical role in promoting discourse coherence by facilitating the semantic integration of separate utterances.