The Chinese Lexicon Project: A megastudy of lexical decision performance for 25,000+ traditional Chinese two-character compound words

Abstract

Using a megastudy approach, we developed a database of lexical variables and lexical decision reaction times and accuracy rates for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese twocharacter compound words. Each word was responded to by about 33 native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. This resource provides a valuable adjunct to influential mega-databases, such as the Chinese single-character, English, French, and Dutch Lexicon Projects. Three analyses were conducted to illustrate the potential uses of the database. First, we compared the proportion of variance in lexical decision performance accounted for by six word frequency measures and established that the best predictor was Cai and Brysbaert's (PLoS One, 5, e10729, 2010) contextual diversity subtitle frequency. Second, we ran virtual replications of three previously published lexical decision experiments and found convergence between the original experiments and the present megastudy. Finally, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the effects of theoretically important lexical variables in our normative data. This is the first publicly available large-scale repository of behavioral responses pertaining to Chinese two-character compound word processing, which should be of substantial interest to psychologists, linguists, and other researchers.Keywords Chinese . Compound word . Megastudy . Reaction time . Visual word recognition In English, a compound word is typically formed by a combination of two or more constituent words (e.g., snow and man in snowman) (Dressler, 2006). Similarly, in Chinese, compound words are often formed via a combination of two or more characters that are almost always monosyllabic morphemes (e.g., 雪人 snow-man [snowman]). However, about 73.6 % of modern Chinese words are two-character compound words (Institute of Language Teaching and Research, 1986), showing that compounding is normative, rather than exceptional, in Chinese word formation (Packard, 2000). Adopting the megastudy approach in Balota et al. 's (2007) English Lexicon Project, we collected normative data for participants' lexical decision (i.e., deciding whether a twocharacter string forms a Chinese word, e.g., 朋友 [friend], or a nonword, e.g., 形忌) performance for more than 25,000 twocharacter Chinese words varying on various lexical characteristics, such as word frequency. Before elaborating on the details of the present megastudy, we first provide a brief selective review of the literature on Chinese two-character compound word processing, including a discussion of its limitations, and then show how the megastudy approach can complement this body of factorial work and help shed additional light on Chinese compound word processing.Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition

“…As in previous megastudies (Ferrand et al, 2010;Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, 2010;Tse et al, 2016), we determined the reliability of accuracy and RTs in order to evaluate how useful they might be. For each word, participants were split in two groups each containing half of the participants having seen that word.…”

“…As Tse et al (2016, p. 7) put it, "Word frequency has consistently been shown to be one of the strongest predictors of visual word recognition in various languages.…”

The Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) database

“…One of the first data sets of this scale was the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al, 2007), which contains responses from visual lexical decision and naming tasks of North American English. More recently, similar studies have been completed for British English (Keuleers et al, 2012), Dutch , French (Ferrand et al, 2010), and Cantonese (Tse et al, 2016), as well as a database of lexical decision and naming across the lifespan for German (Schröter & Schroeder, 2017). These large-scale studies or "megastudies" (Seidenberg & Waters, Small targeted experiments often suffer from sampling difficulties.…”

Normative data for Chinese-English paired associates

“…Another unique characteristic of Chinese characters is that visually complex characters (i.e., high stroke counts) occupy the same amount of space as non-visually-complex characters (e.g., 墙 vs. 力), thereby allowing researchers to select characters with either a high or low information density. Research has shown that RTs in a lexical decision task increase as the complexity of the characters increases (e.g., Tse & Yap, 2018;Tse et al, 2017). Thus, the purpose of the present study was to gather normative data for Chinese-English pairs, which will be of high interest to those wishing to generalize their research to a logographic language, which has many unique characteristics that could further inform psychological theories.…”