Psycholinguistic Norms for 3,783 Two-Character Words in Simplified Chinese

Song, Dangui; Li, Degao

doi:10.1177/21582440211054495

Cited by 5 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…For example, concreteness and imageability (r = .93, p < 0.001) were highly positively correlated. This is in line with most studies (Paivio et al, 1968;Yao et al, 2017;Yee, 2017), but contrary to what was found for Mandarin compounds (Song & Li, 2021). Because ABB words occupy a place between compound or phrase (Van Hoey, 2023), we did not have a specific expectation, but a strong correlation intuitively made sense to us and was borne out in the ratings.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

“…After all, it has been established that many of these variables often correlate, for example, iconicity with sensory experience, abstractness and age of acquisition in Spanish (Hinojosa et al, 2021). Another common positive correlation is that between concreteness and imageability (Brysbaert et al, 2014;Della Rosa et al, 2010), though it is not always found (Song & Li, 2021). The different ratings we collected and present here provide a first descriptive look at how items within a category can be characterized.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 80%

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What ratings and corpus data reveal about the vividness of Mandarin ABB words

Van Hoey,

Yu,

Pan

et al. 2024

Lang. cogn.

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A well-known method of studying iconic words is through the collection of subjective ratings. We collected such ratings regarding familiarity, iconicity, imagery/imageability, concreteness, sensory experience rating (SER), valence and arousal for Mandarin ABB words. This is a type of phrasal compound consisting of a prosaic syllable A and a reduplicated BB part, resulting in a vivid phrasal compound, for example, wù-mángmáng 雾茫茫 ‘completely foggy’. The correlations between the newly collected ABB ratings are contrasted with two other sets of prosaic word ratings, demonstrating that variables that characterize ABB words in an absolute sense may not play a distinctive role when contrasted with other types of words. Next, we provide another angle for looking at ABB words, by investigating to what degree rating data converges with corpus data. By far, the variable that characterizes ABB items consistently throughout these case studies is their high score for imageability, showing that they are indeed rightfully characterized as vivid. Methodologically, we show that it pays off to not take rating data at face value but to contrast it with other comparable datasets of a different phenomenon or data about the same phenomenon compiled in an ontologically different manner.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 80%

What ratings and corpus data reveal about the vividness of Mandarin ABB words

Van Hoey,

Yu,

Pan

et al. 2024

Lang. cogn.

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“…The stimuli were 34 pairs of four-character verb-noun phrases, each comprising two two-character words. These were obtained from a database of 3,783 commonly-used two-character words ( Song and Li, 2021 ). Each pair included a collocation (e.g., 修改文章, “revise the article”) and a control phrase with the same verb but a different noun (e.g., 修改结尾, “revise the ending”).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is there a processing advantage for verb-noun collocations in Chinese reading? Evidence from eye movements during reading

Li,

Wang,

Paterson

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

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A growing number of studies show a processing advantage for collocations, which are commonly-used juxtapositions of words, such as “joint effort” or “shake hands,” suggesting that skilled readers are keenly perceptive to the occurrence of two words in phrases. With the current research, we report two experiments that used eye movement measures during sentence reading to explore the processing of four-character verb-noun collocations in Chinese, such as 修改文章 (“revise the article”). Experiment 1 compared the processing of these collocations relative to similar four-character expressions that are not collocations (e.g., 修改结尾, “revise the ending”) in neutral contexts and contexts in which the collocation was predictable from the preceding sentence context. Experiment 2 further examined the processing of these four-character collocations, by comparing eye movements for commonly-used “strong” collocations, such as 保护环境 (“protect the environment”), as compared to less commonly-used “weak” collocations, such as 保护自然 (“protect nature”), again in neutral contexts and contexts in which the collocations were highly predictable. The results reveal a processing advantage for both collocations relative to novel expressions, and for “strong” collocations relative to “weak” collocations, which was independent of effects of contextual predictability. We interpret these findings as providing further evidence that readers are highly sensitive to the frequency that words co-occur as a phrase in written language, and that a processing advantage for collocations occurs independently of contextual expectations.

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“…Semantic transparency suggests the degree to which a compound character is semantically associated with its components (Tse & Yap, 2018). Imageability refers to the degree to which a CC arouses the readers' sensory-experience-based (Song & Li, 2021) or emotional-experience-based mental images (R. Wang et al, 2020). There is high degree of diversity in how concrete the meanings are among the meaningful CCs.…”

Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Summary of Results. The 12 norm-feature predictors listed in Table 2 could be grouped into four categories (Song & Li, 2021): semantic features (number of meaning, concreteness, imageability, emotion arousal, valence and sensory experience arousal), frequency features (frequency and AOA), visual features (number of strokes and number of components) and number-of-word features (number of words (L) and number of words (R)). As summarized in Table 3, the prediction of SWC by the constituent character norm features was mediated by Wording and Positioning.…”

Section: Prediction Of Swc By Character Norm Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic Overlaps Between Chinese Two-Character Words and Constituent Characters: A Normative Study

Xue,

Li,

Song

et al. 2023

SAGE Open

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In written Chinese, the graphic units are Chinese characters (CCs). Most of the commonly used characters often join with others to form two-character words (2C-words) or words of more than two characters. Indeed, over 70% of the commonly used words are 2C-words. Since almost all characters are meaningful in their own right, there are semantic overlaps between 2C-words and their constituent characters. The present study investigated how normative semantic overlap of 2C-words and their constituent characters (SWC) might be influenced by whether the constituent characters are word or word-not characters (Wording) and by whether they are left or right characters (Positioning) and might be predicted by ordinary features of the constituent characters. The results confirmed earlier work that word-not characters are more strongly associated than word characters with 2C-words, and that right characters are more strongly than left characters associated with the 2C-words in semantics. The present study is also the first to provide evidence concerning the prediction of SWC by the norm features of the constituent characters. Skilled readers’ perception of the semantic features, frequency features and number-of-word features of the constituent characters may be mediated by Wording and Positioning in 2C-word semantic processing. However, they are not likely to perceive the visual features of the constituent characters. Rather, they seem to take the constituent characters of m-CCs as individual units, which should be highly familiar to them. In a semantic task on 2C-words, skilled readers may process the constituent characters in number of meanings, concreteness, imageability and emotion arousal, but not in sensory experience arousal. There appears to be a close association in valence between the 2C-words and the word characters, but not between the 2C-words and the word-not characters. These findings strongly support the theoretical argument that both words and characters should be taken as language units in Chinese. However, Wording and Positioning should be considered carefully when considering a CC as a language unit. These findings may be of more general significance for semantic understanding of compound words.

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Psycholinguistic Norms for 3,783 Two-Character Words in Simplified Chinese

Cited by 5 publications

References 78 publications

What ratings and corpus data reveal about the vividness of Mandarin ABB words

What ratings and corpus data reveal about the vividness of Mandarin ABB words

Is there a processing advantage for verb-noun collocations in Chinese reading? Evidence from eye movements during reading

Semantic Overlaps Between Chinese Two-Character Words and Constituent Characters: A Normative Study

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