Chinese as a natural experiment

The Chinese lexicon is characterized by its typologically unique one-to-one-to-one mapping of morphemes, syllables, and orthographic characters. This architecture poses practical difficulties for the psycholinguist wanting to study lexical processing in Chinese. More seriously, seen as a natural experiment, Chinese challenges assumptions that processing models traditionally make about the roles of phonemes, morphemes, lemmas, and words in lexical access. It is argued that cross-linguistic variation in lexical processing cannot be accommodated by simply modifying lexical processing models, but instead what is needed is a universal learning model. Suggestions are given for how such a model could be tested empirically by extending methods already used for testing language-specific lexical processing.

[1]  Conrad Perry,et al.  Prosody and lemma selection , 2005, Memory & cognition.

[2]  M. Cysouw.  Quantitative methods in typology , 2005 .

[3]  J. Ehrich,et al.  Acquiring an Artificial Logographic Orthography , 2009 .

[4]  Jeff Mielke,et al.  The Emergence of Distinctive Features , 2008 .

[5]  Robert Schreuder,et al.  How Complex Simplex Words can be , 1997 .

[6]  R. French,et al.  Understanding bilingual memory: models and data , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[7]  E. Bates,et al.  Psycholinguistics: a cross-language perspective. , 2001, Annual review of psychology.

[8]  Ardi Roelofs,et al.  Morphology by itself in planning the production of spoken words , 2002, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[9]  S. Levinson,et al.  The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. , 2009, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[10]  W. H. Baxter.  A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology , 2010 .

[11]  Ardi Roelofs,et al.  Morpheme frequency in speech production: Testing weaver , 1997 .

[12]  E. Pothos.  Theories of artificial grammar learning. , 2007, Psychological bulletin.

[13]  Chia-Ying Lee,et al.  Hemispheric processing of Chinese polysemy in the disyllabic verb/ noun compounds: an event-related potential study , 2010, HLT-NAACL 2010.

[14]  J. Hawkins.  Processing typology and why psychologists need to know about it , 2007 .

[15]  James L. McClelland,et al.  The TRACE model of speech perception , 1986, Cognitive Psychology.

[16]  Ping Li,et al.  Word naming and psycholinguistic norms: Chinese , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[17]  M. Haspelmath,et al.  Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies , 2010 .

[18]  Jie-Li Tsai,et al.  Orthographic neighborhood effects in reading Chinese two-character words , 2006, Neuroreport.

[19]  M. Brysbaert,et al.  SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese Word and Character Frequencies Based on Film Subtitles , 2010, PloS one.

[20]  David B. Pisoni,et al.  Similarity neighborhoods of spoken words , 1991 .

[21]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[22]  Jenn-Yeu Chen,et al.  Morphological encoding in the production of compound words in Mandarin Chinese , 2006 .

[23]  Kenneth Ward Church,et al.  Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography , 1989, ACL.

[24]  John Defrancis.  The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy , 1986 .

[25]  T. Florian Jaeger,et al.  The Cross-linguistic Study of Sentence Production , 2009, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[26]  J. Packard.  The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach , 2000 .

[27]  R. Baayen.  A real experiment is a factorial experiment , 2010 .

[28]  Gary S Dell,et al.  Speech errors reflect newly learned phonotactic constraints. , 2006, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[29]  R. Baayen,et al.  Frequency effects in compound production. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[30]  N. Zhang,et al.  Root merger in Chinese compounds , 2007 .

[31]  Kara D. Federmeier,et al.  Timed picture naming in seven languages , 2003, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[32]  M. Hauser,et al.  Learning at a distance II. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies in a non-human primate , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[33]  Jenn-Yeu Chen,et al.  Form encoding in Chinese word production does not involve morphemes , 2007 .

[34]  P. O'Seaghdha,et al.  Proximate units in word production: Phonological encoding begins with syllables in Mandarin Chinese but with segments in English , 2010, Cognition.

[35]  J. Hanley,et al.  Phonological awareness and visual skills in learning to read Chinese and English , 1995, Cognition.

[36]  A. Cutler,et al.  Cross-language psycholinguistics , 1985 .

[37]  A. Meyer.  The time course of phonological encoding in language production: Phonological encoding inside a syllable , 1991 .

[38]  Christiane Fellbaum,et al.  Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , 1999, CL.

[39]  Twila Tardif,et al.  The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics: The importance of verbs in Chinese , 2006 .

[40]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  The time course of spoken word learning and recognition: studies with artificial lexicons. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[41]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  A tale of two frequencies: Determining the speed of lexical access for Mandarin Chinese and English compounds , 2008 .

[42]  E. Newport,et al.  Learning at a distance I. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[43]  Jinseung Eu.  Testing search engine frequencies: Patterns of inconsistency , 2008 .

[44]  C. Fisher,et al.  Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience , 2002, Cognition.

[45]  Todd M. Bailey,et al.  Determinants of wordlikeness: Phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods? , 2001 .

[46]  G. Dell,et al.  A Cross-Linguistic Study of Phonological Units: Syllables Emerge from the Statistics of Mandarin Chinese, but not from the Statistics of English , 2007 .

[47]  Marcus Taft,et al.  The representation of bound morphemes in the lexicon: A Chinese study. , 1995 .

[48]  Willem J. M. Levelt,et al.  A theory of lexical access in speech production , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[49]  David Gil,et al.  The World Atlas of Language Structures , 2005 .

[50]  Yen-Hwei Lin.  The sounds of Chinese , 2007 .

[51]  James Myers,et al.  Processing Chinese Compounds: A survey of the literature , 2007 .

[52]  Gary S. Dell,et al.  Structure and Content in Language Production: A Theory of Frame Constraints in Phonological Speech Errors , 1993, Cogn. Sci..

[53]  J. Myers.  Generative morphology as psycholinguistics , 2007 .

[54]  James Myers,et al.  Frequency effects in the processing of Chinese inflection , 2006 .