Decomposed Storage in the Chinese Lexicon

This study investigated the hypothesis that representations of Chinese words are stored in morphologically decomposed form. Three lexical decision experiments are reported in which the character frequency, word frequency and morphological structure of word stimuli were varied. Results show that when word frequency is controlled, the frequency of the two characters of coordinative words determines the latencies of the stimuli, but for modifier words, only the second character's frequency affects the response to stimulus words. When character frequency is controlled, word frequency determines the latencies of two-character words. It is proposed that Chinese words are accessed via the character, and that the morphological structure has a role in the representation of characters in the lexicon