published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Kin Fai Ellick Wong. / "July 2000." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-130). / 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. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

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.

Lexical compounding refers to the process of word formation through union of lexicalized morphemes. Given that young Chinese readers learn print vocabulary as unanalyzed whole, I am uncertain whether children can effortlessly decompose bound morphemes from disyllabic words for lexical compounding to occur. With this concern, I propose a lexical blending process in parallel with lexical compounding, where words are constructed from previously learnt words that have not yet been decomposed as morphemes. This thesis investigated the mechanisms behind the lexical blending process, as well as its role in word reading among young Chinese readers, in five studies Studies One and Two examined the factors that favor lexical blending to occur. In Study One, I located a high proportion of disyllabic words and bound morphemes within a corpus of Chinese textbooks in Hong Kong. Around 40-50% of disyllabic words in Grade One to Grade Three are composed of one or more bound morphemes, which set a favorable environment for lexical blending to occur. In Study Two, I found that younger readers tended to commit more selection errors, defined as “naming the target character as a character that forms a highly frequent two-character compound word with it” (Shu, Meng, Chen, Luan and Cao, 2005), than older readers during character reading, suggesting that their representations of bound morphemes were not precise. An experiment on morpheme name judgment demonstrated that bound morphemes and low frequency morphemes embedded in high frequency words were most prone to selection errors. I further examined the lexical blending process and its contribution to reading development in Studies Three and Four. Adopting a cross-sequential design in Study Three, I found that lexical blending concurrently and longitudinally predicted Chinese word reading, after lexical compounding and other reading-related variables were partialled out. In Study Four, I located lexical class and structural relation knowledge as significant component skills of lexical blending. The process of lexical blending proceeded first with structural arrangement of words, followed by morphological decomposition and union of morphemes to eventually form a blended word. I also tested Chinese dyslexic readers’ performance on lexical blending in Study Five. Dyslexic readers exhibited difficulties in lexical blending and all the related component skills, when compared with chronological-age (CA) matched controls. Process-wise, the dyslexic readers were weaker than CA controls in both structural arrangement and morphological decomposition, while having particular difficulties in the latter process. I conclude that lexical blending is an important word formation process for young Chinese readers. To aid mastery of lexical blending, readers should be aware of the syntax in phrases and sentences, as it provides cues on structural arrangement of blended words. In addition, I suggest explicit instruction on lexical blending skills in the curriculum, with a particular focus on morphological decomposition, in order to meet the learning needs of dyslexic readers. / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Mo, Deyuan. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-167). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; appendixes includes Chinese.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Education