Processing Compound Words in Chinese: Morphology, Semantic Transparency, Context

This study focuses on how those being socialized into the Chinese language address and process the Chinese compound word semantic. One such place for exposure to these compound words is the museum, where texts are designed to complement the artefact in its multimodal representation of history. Here, we investigate three issues related to compound words; morphological awareness, semantic transparency, and context. We documented language interactions of sixty participants, divided into three groups: Sino-sphere, non-Sino-sphere, and native first language groups. The groups participated in three tasks, lexical judgement, lexical inference in context-free conditions, and lexical inference in context-dependent conditions. The results revealed that an early morpho-semantic activation was observed in opaque compound processing by the individuals exposed to the Chinese language in museums, as non-native speakers, verifying their morphological awareness as the native controls. The semantic transparency effect led to a dichotomous difficulty for Chinese specific-purpose lexical items; specifically, the foreigners being socialized into Chinese as a foreign language found opaque words challenging and non-opaque words less challenging. In contrast, native speakers were more sensitive to compound words with varying degrees of semantic transparency.