Huang Hsu-Wen, Lee Chia-Ying
Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong.
Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
Front Psychol. 2018 Mar 29;9:324. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00324. eCollection 2018.
In English, an extensive body of work in both behavioral and neuropsychological domains has produced strong evidence that homonymy (words with many distinct meanings) and polysemy (many related senses) are represented, retrieved, and processed differently in the human brain. In Chinese, most words are compounds, and the constituent characters within a compound word can have different meanings and/or related senses on their own. Thus, in order to resolve lexical ambiguity in Chinese, one has to consider the composition of constituent characters, as well as how they contribute to whole word reading, known as "sublexical ambiguity." This study investigates how two types of sublexical ambiguity affect Chinese word processing. The number of meanings (NOM) and the number of senses (NOS) corresponding to the first character of Chinese compounds were manipulated in a lexical decision task. The interactions between NOM and NOS were observed in both behavioral results and N400s, in which NOM disadvantage effect was found for words with few-senses only. On the other hand, the NOS facilitation effect was significant for words with multiple-meanings (NOM > 1) only. The sublexical ambiguity disadvantage suggested that semantically unrelated morphemes are represented as separate entries. For characters with multiple meanings, one orthographic form is associated with more than one morphemic representation. In contrast, the sublexical sense advantage supported the idea that semantically related senses that shared a morphological root are represented within a single entry. The more senses listed in a morphological root, the stronger representation will be formed. These results suggest that two types of sublexical ambiguities are represented and processed differently in Chinese word recognition models and also demonstrate that how they interact with each other in the mental lexicon.
在英文中，行为学和神经心理学领域的大量研究工作已产生有力证据，表明同音异义词（具有许多不同含义的词）和多义词（许多相关意义）在人类大脑中的表征、提取和处理方式不同。在中文里，大多数词是复合词，复合词中的组成汉字本身可能有不同的含义和/或相关意义。因此，为了解决中文中的词汇歧义，人们必须考虑组成汉字的构成，以及它们如何对整个单词的阅读产生影响，即所谓的“次词汇歧义”。本研究调查了两种类型的次词汇歧义如何影响中文单词处理。在词汇判断任务中，对中文复合词第一个汉字对应的意义数量（NOM）和义项数量（NOS）进行了操控。在行为结果和N400中均观察到NOM和NOS之间的相互作用，其中仅在义项较少的词中发现了NOM劣势效应。另一方面，仅在具有多个意义（NOM>1）的词中，NOS促进效应显著。次词汇歧义劣势表明语义不相关的语素被表示为单独的条目。对于具有多个意义的汉字，一种正字法形式与不止一种语素表征相关联。相比之下，次词汇义项优势支持这样一种观点，即共享形态词根的语义相关义项在单个条目中表征。形态词根中列出的义项越多，形成的表征就越强。这些结果表明，两种类型的次词汇歧义在中文单词识别模型中的表征和处理方式不同，也证明了它们在心理词典中如何相互作用。
