ArticleQuarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)2021
Compound word frequency modifies the effect of character frequency in reading Chinese.
Article in Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hierarchy of the Constituent Characters in Chinese Non-Idiomatic Three-Character Words: An Eye-Tracking Study.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The role of sentence context on compound word processing.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Compositional processing in the recognition of Chinese compounds: Behavioural and computational studies.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- The role of format familiarity and semantic transparency in Chinese reading: evidence from eye movements.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Coregistration of eye movements and EEG reveals frequency effects of words and their constituent characters in natural silent Chinese reading.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Lexical Orthographic Knowledge Mediates the Relationship Between Character Reading and Reading Comprehension Among Learners With Chinese as a Second Language.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
In two eye-tracking studies, reading of two-character Chinese compound words was examined. First and second character frequency were orthogonally manipulated to examine the extent to which Chinese compound words are processed via the component characters. In Experiment 1, first and second character frequency were manipulated for frequent compound words, whereas in Experiment 2 it was done for infrequent compound words. Fixation time and skipping probability for the first and second character were affected by its frequency in neither experiment, nor in their pooled analysis. Yet, in Experiment 2 fixations on the second character were longer when a high-frequency character was presented as the first character compared with when a low-frequency character was presented as the first character. This reversed character frequency effect reflects a morphological family size effect and is explained by the constraint hypothesis, according to which fixation time on the second component of two-component compound words is shorter when its identity is constrained by the first component. It is concluded that frequent Chinese compound words are processed holistically, whereas with infrequent compound words there is some room for the characters to play a role in the identification process.
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