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Number of Meanings and Number of Senses: An ERP Study of Sublexical Ambiguities in Reading Chinese Disyllabic Compounds

Overview of attention for article published in Frontiers in Psychology, March 2018
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Title
Number of Meanings and Number of Senses: An ERP Study of Sublexical Ambiguities in Reading Chinese Disyllabic Compounds
Published in
Frontiers in Psychology, March 2018
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00324
Pubmed ID
Authors

Hsu-Wen Huang, Chia-Ying Lee

Abstract

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.

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Mendeley readers

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The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 21 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 21 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 9 43%
Student > Doctoral Student 2 10%
Unspecified 1 5%
Lecturer 1 5%
Student > Master 1 5%
Other 1 5%
Unknown 6 29%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Psychology 6 29%
Social Sciences 3 14%
Computer Science 1 5%
Unspecified 1 5%
Linguistics 1 5%
Other 1 5%
Unknown 8 38%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 31 March 2018.
All research outputs
#17,932,482
of 23,025,074 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#20,767
of 30,283 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#239,640
of 329,857 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#478
of 565 outputs
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