There is Something About Grammatical Category in Chinese Visual Word Recognition

Abstract

The differential processing of nouns and verbs has been attributed to a combination of morphological, syntactic and semantic factors which are often intertwined with other general lexical properties. This study tested the noun-verb difference with Chinese disyllabic words controlled on various lexical parameters. As Chinese words are free from inflectional morphology, any psychological distinction observed for nouns and verbs could be more convincingly attributed to syntactic factors echoing their linguistic distinction. Comparison among nouns, verbs and adjectives in lexical decision showed that nouns were processed faster than both verbs and adjectives, while the latter two classes, which are syntactically similar in Chinese, did not show any significant difference. The noun advantage over verbs was consistently found even when the classical frequency effect was duly considered. Thus the noun-verb distinction apparently surfaces at an early stage of lexical processing, and it is suggested that nouns may have a higher base activation level as they are linguistically less complex, which makes their access relatively more facilitated than verbs.

Keywords: Chinese disyllabic words; Frequency effect; Grammatical category; Lexical decision; Noun advantage.