ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of morphological structure in the representation and access of disyllabic words in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Psycholinguistic research uses the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. In three experiments, subjects made lexical decision responses to spoken disyllabic words and nonwords. In first Experiment, word frequency, morpheme frequency and syllable frequency were varied, with either the first or second constituent of the compound held constant. The results for real words were replicated in second experiment, where syllable and morpheme frequency were varied for pairs of words sharing common morphemes in first or second position. Third experiment, however, showed that when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. The overall results were interpreted in terms of a multi-level cluster model, with separate syllabic, morphemic and whole-word levels of representation.
