Tracing Lexical and Sub-Lexical Semantic Contributions to Chinese Compound Word Recognition: An ERP Investigation...

There are divergent viewpoints on how Chinese compound words undergo morphological processing-especially regarding the role and timing of morphemic semantics during word recognition. Whether-and in what way-lexical and sublexical semantics influence the recognition of Chinese compound words remains unclear; this issue is central to the debate between form-then-meaning and form-and-meaning processing models.

We investigated morphological effects on compound processing by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) to Chinese compound targets that were preceded by five prime types: W+M+, W-M+, W-M- (W = whole-word semantics, M = morphemic meaning, "+" = congruent, "-" = incongruent), a purely semantic prime, and an unrelated prime. This design simultaneously controlled prime-target relatedness at both the morphemic and whole-word levels.

The results showed that, across both the 100-300 ms and 300-500 ms windows, the W-M+ and W-M- conditions produced statistically equivalent priming effects, suggesting that the semantic content of individual morphemes contributes only minimally to recognizing the compound as a whole.

These findings align more closely with morphological models proposing parallel processing of form and meaning, as opposed to frameworks that assume a strictly hierarchical or step-by-step sequence.