Psycholinguistic Processing of Chinese Polysemy
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Tsai, Pei-Shu
DOI
en-US
Abstract
This thesis aims to investigate the psychological reality of Chinese polysemous words. By manipulating part of speech of the stimuli, and by distinguishing number of senses and number of meaning facets in the stimuli, this research will be able to answer the questions of (1) whether multiple-sense words are recognized faster than one-sense words, (2) whether words with many meaning facets are recognized faster than words with one meaning facet, and (3) whether part of speech plays an influencing role in lexical processing.
This study follows theories on Chinese lexical semantics (Ahrens et al., 1998, 2003; Huang, 2005a, 2005b) in defining senses and meaning facets of Chinese words. It replicates and extends Lin’s research on processing of multiple senses of Chinese words by examining three semantic effects on word recognition, including number-of-sense (NOS) effect, number-of-facet (NOF) effect, and number-of-category (NOC) effect. The NOS effect predicts that words with more senses are recognized faster than words with fewer senses. The NOF effect predicts that words with more meaning facet are recognized faster than those with fewer meaning facets. The NOC effect predicts that words that can be used as different parts of speech (i.e., different syntactic categories) are recognized faster than words that are used as only one syntactic category.
Two experiments using lexical decision task were carried out in order to examine the three predictions above. Each experiment had 40 subjects who were undergraduate students of National Taiwan University. The experimental stimuli were controlled for syllable length, part of speech, printed word frequency, and experiential familiarity.
The results confirmed predictions of the NOS effect on verbs, the NOF effect on nouns, and prediction of the NOC effect. However, the results showed that the time needed for recognizing multiple-sense nouns was longer than the time needed for one-sense nouns, and the time for recognizing multiple-facet verbs was longer than the time needed for one-facet verbs.
Based on the findings, this thesis sheds light on the experimental methodology, indicating the necessity to separate stimuli by their parts of speech. The thesis also supports the work discussed in Ahrens et al. (1998), which argues for the need to separate meaning facet from word sense. Finally, this study contributes to the discussion on the representation of mental lexicon, suggesting modification of a random access model (Rubenstein et al., 1970, 1971) and a connectionist model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981).
Subjects
詞彙語意學
詞彙提取
詞義數目效應
義面數目效應
詞類數目效應
詞類
lexical semantics
lexical access
NOS effect
NOF effect
NOC effect
word category
part of speech
Type
other
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