Psychological Reality of the Word in Chinese

Parafoveal processing across different lexical constituents in Chinese reading

“…Thus, in terms of their formal linguistic characterization, our stimuli were clearly from three distinct categories. Hoosain, 1992;Li, Rayner & Cave, 2009).…”

Parafoveal processing in reading

“…In Chinese, words are composed of one to four characters (morphemes) and written without spaces between words. Therefore, word boundaries in Chinese are more ambiguous (i.e., readers disagree sometimes as to where the boundaries between words are; Bai, Yan, Liversedge, Zang, & Rayner, 2008;Hoosain, 1992). While skilled Chinese readers do not show any benefit from reading text with spaces inserted between word boundaries (or with highlighting to mark word boundaries) over reading canonically unspaced text, they do show a deficit in processing text in which spaces are inserted between every character or between some characters, resulting in character combinations that produced nonwords (Bai et al, 2008).…”

Interference Effects of Possible-Word Constraints (Pwc) in Cantonese Speech Segmentation

“…Unlike the English language, if a disyllabic spoken Cantonese (Chinese) word is divided into two parts by placing a sound in between, the two divided monosyllables can still be an independent "word" irrespective of their semantic vagueness of each monosyllable (see the examples in the Introduction). So, as mentioned from the studies of Hoosain (1991Hoosain ( , 1992, he claimed that the minimal condition to be a Cantonese (or Chinese) word with concrete meaning is that there is impossible to insert anything inbetween a disyllabic compound word structure. Therefore, as shown in the present experiment, the intermediate context condition produces the greatest interference effects to participants' word recognition performance is obviously a good indicator to support the effectiveness of the PWC effects in Cantonese speech segmentation.…”

“…The syllable-spotting performance confirmed that native Cantonese listeners really found it more difficult to spot out the target In the present study, I extend the work along the following lines. First, to understand the effects of PWC in Cantonese speech more thoroughly, I used disyllabic compound words as the stimuli because the concept of "word" in Cantonese is ambiguous and most of the researchers in the field generally agreed that the concept of "word" or a word in Cantonese is most likely involved a disyllabic compound word in Cantonese (or more broadly in Chinese) (Chen, 1996;Hoosain, 1991Hoosain, , 1992Perfetti & Tan, 1999;Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1995 Yip, 2000b for more details; Li & Yip, 1998). Due to this special morphemic nature of words in Cantonese, it produces a very interesting direction to critically examine the effects of PWC in Cantonese speech segmentation.…”