Time course of the integration of the morpho-semantics and the meaning of two-character Chinese compound words

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that morpho-semantic information can be activated automatically and influence the access of word meaning in compound word recognition. However, the time course underlying the morpho-semantic activation and its subsequent integration is not clear yet. In particular, little is known about how morpho-semantic information involves in word semantic integration processing.

The present study examined the time course of morpho-semantic information of the first and the second characters who participated in whole-word semantic integration processing using event-related potential (ERP) technology. We selected three types of two-character words: transparent, opaque compound words, and monomorphemic words. For the transparent words (e.g., 炽热), both two characters’ meanings (both 炽 and 热 mean hot) were identical or similar to the word meaning (炽热 means hot). As for the opaque words (e.g., 风流), the meaning of the first character (风means wind), the second character (流 means flow), and the compound word (风流 means amorousness) were completely different. The monomorphemic words (e.g., 伶俐) were materials as the control condition with two characters that cannot be split into two morphemes. Participants were instructed to complete a visual lexical decision task.

ERP results showed that the first character processing revealed the morphological effect in the early (300~400 ms) and the late (460~700 ms) time window, in which two types of compound words induced more negative amplitude than the monomorphemic words. During the second character processing, a significant semantic transparency effect was observed in the early stage (260~420 ms), that the opaque words evoked more negative-going waveform than the transparent ones. Whereas at the late phase (480~700 ms), a reversed morphological effect emerged that the two types of compound words evoked more positive amplitude than the monomorphemic words.

The present study shed light on the time course of morpho-semantic integration in Chinese compound word recognition. The results indicated that the morpho-semantic processing began at the early stage of processing the first character. The transparent morpho-semantic of the first character influences the second character’s morpho-semantic activation and subsequently facilitates the semantic access of the compound words.