Form encoding in Chinese word production does not involve morphemes

Abstract

Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or bimorphemic. They shared the initial syllables or did not. In the bimorphemic condition, the shared syllables were of the same character and of the same morpheme. The form preparation effects were similar in the two conditions. In Experiment 2, the disyllabic target words were bimorphemic. They shared the initial characters or did not. A substantial character preparation effect was observed, but the effect was similar whether the shared characters corresponded to the same or different morphemes. The results of the two experiments support the conclusion that form encoding in Chinese word production involves only the syllable, not the morpheme, nor the orthography.

Acknowledgements

The study reported here was supported by a grant from the National Science Council (NSC93-2413-H-006-008) and a grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (RG006-D-01) awarded to Jenn-Yeu Chen. Train-Min Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan. She was also supported by a fellowship from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. We thank Harold Bayaan and the other reviewer, as well as the action editor, for their very constructive comments that helped improve the earlier version of this paper substantially.