Influence of word recognition on Chinese sentence segmentation

Abstract

This study focuses on the influence of the existing patterns of multi-character words on Chinese sentence segmentation, especially in conditions where there are alternative ways to group the characters in a sentence. Two experiments are carried out in this study. The results show that the word pattern whose lexical decision latency is shorter pops out among a string consisting of several characters. In addition, where the components of a pattern are not adjacently presented, they may be still recalled together as a word by the subjects. It reflects a top-down process, in contrast with a purely bottom-up, passively driven process.