by Au-Yeung Lai Hung. / Running title: Chinese reading. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-130). / Acknowledgements / Abstract / Table of Contents / List of Tables / List of Figures / List of Appendices / Introduction --- p.1 / The Chinese Language and Some of Its Major Features --- p.4 / The Role of Parafoveal Visual Information in Chinese Reading: Implications on Eye Movement Control and the Characteristics of the Perceptual Span --- p.7 / General Views of Language Comprehension Processes --- p.13 / General theoretical backgrounds --- p.13 / Functional roles of Chinese word categories --- p.18 / Research Problems and Method --- p.20 / Experiment I --- p.23 / Method --- p.27 / Results and Discussion --- p.32 / "Comprehension performance, reading time, and reading efficiency" --- p.32 / Component processes in Chinese reading --- p.40 / Overall mean RT analyses --- p.42 / Separate analyses for each session --- p.47 / Experiment II --- p.51 / Method --- p.58 / Results and Discussion --- p.60 / Comprehension performance and reading time --- p.60 / Component processes in various display conditions --- p.66 / Experiment III --- p.73 / Method --- p.76 / Results --- p.80 / Results for SVO sentence structure --- p.81 / Results for SOV sentence structure --- p.88 / Results for OSV sentence structure --- p.96 / Discussion --- p.103 / Lexical access and sentence comprehension --- p.103 / Verb violation --- p.105 / Noun violation --- p.108 / Clause boundary effect --- p.111 / Differential effects of the types of violation on word types --- p.113 / The interactive nature of Chinese processing --- p.113 / Evaluations of the results from various word orders --- p.114 / General Conclusion --- p.116 / References --- p.125 / Appendices --- p.131

Lau Wing Yin, Verena. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-78). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Acknowledgments --- p.2 / Abstract in English --- p.3 / Abstract in Chinese --- p.4 / Introduction --- p.5 / Major features of the Chinese language and processes in Chinese reading comprehension / Different paradigms in Chinese reading comprehension / Research questions of the present study / Research design of the present study / Experiment1 --- p.24 / Experiment2 --- p.32 / Experiment3 --- p.39 / General Discussion --- p.57 / Conclusion --- p.73 / References --- p.74 / Appendix A --- p.79 / Appendix B --- p.84

Yip, Chi-Wing. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-62).

Sum Kwok-wing. / Thesis submitted in: December 2003. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-79). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Chinese Abstract (論文摘要) --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.iv / Table of Contents --- p.v / List of Tables --- p.vi / List of Figures --- p.vii / Chapter Chapter 1 - --- "Significance of Onset, Rime and Tone in Monosyllab Words" --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 - --- General Methods --- p.19 / Chapter Chapter 3 - --- Experiment 1 --- p.28 / Chapter Chapter 4 - --- Experiment 2 --- p.35 / Chapter Chapter 5 - --- Experiment 3 --- p.41 / Chapter Chapter 6 - --- Comparison and Summary of the First Three Experiments --- p.47 / Chapter Chapter 7 - --- Experiment 4 --- p.53 / Chapter Chapter 8 - --- General Discussion --- p.59 / References --- p.72 / Appendix I --- p.79 / Appendix II --- p.87 / Appendix III --- p.95 / Appendix IV --- p.103 / Appendix V --- p.111 / Appendix VI --- p.112 / Appendix VII --- p.113

Chi-kong Tang. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-50). / Appendixes in Chinese. / Acknowledgments --- p.i / Abstract --- p.ii / Table of Contents --- p.iii / List of Tables --- p.v / List of Figures --- p.vi / List of Appendices --- p.vii / Introduction --- p.1 / Eye Movement Control and Effective Vision in Reading English --- p.1 / Comparison of Chinese and English --- p.4 / Effective Vision in Chinese Reading --- p.5 / Research Questions of Present Study --- p.6 / Research Design of Present Study --- p.9 / EXPERIMENT1 --- p.11 / Method --- p.12 / Results --- p.19 / Discussion --- p.21 / EXPERIMENT2 --- p.24 / Method --- p.24 / Results --- p.26 / Discussion --- p.28 / EXPERIMENT3 --- p.31 / Method --- p.32 / Results --- p.34 / Discussion --- p.37 / General Discussion --- p.41 / Conclusion --- p.46 / References --- p.47 / Appendices --- p.51

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

In sum, the three studies suggest that, on one hand, Chinese compound words, particularly the opaque ones, seem to be represented as holistic orthographic units in the mental lexicon. On the other hand, the meanings of the component morphemes are activated in visual recognition of Chinese compound words, suggesting a decomposed access. The implications of these results for a model of Chinese compound word representation and access, as well as the dispute between morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic decomposition accounts of morphological processing in other languages, were discussed. / Study 2 adapted the transposed-letter similarity effect in English (Forster, Davis, Schoknecht, & Carter, 1987; Acah & Perea, 2008) into transposed-character similarity effect in Chinese to further examine the orthographic representation of Chinese compound words. Study 2 examined the processing of both transposable and untransposable compound words to distinguish the decomposed account (which assumes morpheme-to-word activation) and the holistic account (which assumes activation of word-level orthographic representation) of the mental representation of Chinese compound words. It was found that transposable word-word pairs (e.g., [special characters omitted], means tie in English-[special characters omitted], means lead in English) did not produce significant priming effects. This result is inconsistent with the decomposed account, but is explicable in terms of the holistic account. Two follow-up experiments show that the transposed-character similarity effects differ for transparent (e.g., [special characters omitted], means proud in English) and opaque words (e.g., [special characters omitted], means careless in English). Transposed nonwords show significant facilitation effect to the original words when the original words were opaque (e.g., [special characters omitted]) but not when they were transparent words (e.g., [special characters omitted]). It suggests that opaque words are more likely than transparent words to be represented as orthographic wholes. The findings of word-level orthographic representation and the influence of semantic transparency provide convergent evidence for the conclusions reached by Study 1. / The first two studies are concerned with whether Chinese two-character compound words have decomposed or holistic orthographic representations in the mental lexicon. Study 1 made use of the high frequency orthographic neighbor inhibition effect (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996; Davis & Lupker, 2006) in the masked priming paradigm. It was found that a high frequency orthographic neighbor (e.g., [special characters omitted] means virtually in English) inhibited recognition of a low frequency target word (e.g., [special characters omitted], means brief in English). The high frequency orthographic neighbor inhibition effect was supposed to be caused by lexical competition between prime and target words (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). Therefore, the observation of inhibition in Study 1 suggests that the prime words have word-level representations that compete with those of target words for lexical access. It is argued that the activated word-level lexical representation is likely to be orthographic representation, rather than phonological and semantic representations, because the influence of phonology was found to be limited in a follow-up experiment, and the semantic relatedness between the prime and target words was low. Furthermore, because the inhibition effects were stronger for semantically opaque than transparent compound words, it seems that opaque words are more likely than transparent words to be represented as unitary units. / The third study investigated whether or not the meaning of a component morpheme would be activated in the process of recognizing a Chinese two-character compound word. Current accounts of morphological processing disagree on whether morphological processing is form then meaning, or form with meaning (Feldman, O'Connor, & Del Prado Martin, 2009; Davis & Rastle, 2010). The focus of the debate is actually whether morpheme meaning activation occurs at early stage of compound word processing. This study attempted to contribute to that debate by trying to dissociate morphological processing of form and meaning. The method was to investigate masked priming effects produced by prime-target pairs that contained a pair of semantically related morphemes but without any overlap in orthography, phonology or whole-word meaning (e.g., [special characters omitted] /surprised in English/-[special characters omitted]/break one's promise in English/). Since there was no overlap between the prime and the target in form, any priming effects produced could be attributed unequivocally to activation of morpheme meaning (e.g., [special characters omitted], both means eat in English). The results of Study 3 show that morpheme meaning activation without form overlap occurred as early as the first 60ms of word processing. This finding is more consistent with the form-with-meaning than the form-then-meaning account. / This dissertation reports on three studies of the cognitive representations and processes in visual recognition of Chinese two-character compound words. Because Chinese two-character compound words are composed of two spatially separated characters which themselves are words, there has been a debate about whether these words are represented and processed in the mental lexicon as unitary wholes or as combinations of the component characters (Zhang & Peng, 1992; Taft & Zhu, 1995). / Zhang, Lingyan. / Advisers: Yujing Ni; Ling-po Shiu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-07(E), Section: A. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-153). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; includes Chinese.

Li Hong. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-142). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

In Experiments 3 and 4, event-related potentials were recorded to verify the findings of the first two behavioral experiments. Similarly, Experiment 3 employed the lexical decision task and Experiment 4 used the position decision task. First, results revealed that a series of ERP components (P150, P200, and N400) were found to be related to the effect of position-specific radical frequency when the lexical decision task was used (Experiment 3). However, when replacing the lexical decision task with the position decision task but keeping illegal characters as fillers, the effect of position-specific radical frequency became quite weak, which was only associated with P200 (Experiment 4a). Moreover, when using the position decision task but replacing illegal characters with geometric figures as fillers, there were no effects of position-specific radical frequency any more (Experiment 4b). Second, the task was found to influence the time course for effects of position-free radical frequency, which was reflected by P200 in the lexical decision task (Experiment 3) and by N400 in the position decision task (Experiments 4a and 4b). Finally, simple character frequency could play a role in processing compound characters in which simple characters were used as radicals, but such effect was significant only in the position decision task and it was reflected by a change in N400 (Experiments 4a and 4b). / These findings indicate that position-specific radicals could play a role in character recognition, but this effect appears to be constrained by the task and/or the composition of materials. In contrast, effects of position-free radicals keep stable across different tasks and composition of materials. In addition, the findings also suggest that simple character information could exert influence on compound character processing, but only when characters are processed implicitly (e.g., in the position decision task). Implications of this research and future directions are discussed. / This research was designed to examine the processing of different kinds of radical frequency information, i.e. frequency as a position-free radical, frequency as a position-specific radical, and frequency as a stand alone character. Whether the task or the composition of materials could influence the processing of such information was also examined. The first two were behavioral experiments and results indicated that effect of the position-free radical frequency was stable across the lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and the position decision task (Experiment 2). Effect of the position-specific radical frequency emerged only when the lexical decision task was available (Experiment 1). / Wu, Yan. / Adviser: Hsuan Chih Chen. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-04, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-108). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; includes Chinese characters in Appendix A-C.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy