Chinese lexical database (CLD) : A large-scale lexical database for simplified Mandarin Chinese

Rethinking orthographic neighbor in Chinese two-character word recognition: Insights from a megastudy

The influence of orthographic neighbors on visual word recognition is well established in alphabetic scripts. To determine the universality of this effect across writing systems, researchers have been keen on exploring its presence and nature in Chinese word recognition. Given that Chinese is logographic, it necessitates a different definition for orthographic neighbors from the ones used in alphabetic scripts. One popular approach is to consider words that share characters as orthographic neighbors. Adopting this definition, a facilitative effect has been observed for characters that can create more words. However, as characters are also morphemes in Chinese, the facilitation found might actually come from a larger morphological family size. This possibility was tested in the present study by analyzing data from the Chinese Lexicon Project (CLP; Tse et al., Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1503-1519, 2017, Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1503-1519, 2022), a megastudy of two-character word recognition in traditional Chinese. If the effects of character-sharing are indeed morphological in nature, the facilitation should be smaller for ambiguous characters because the words formed are distributed over several morphological families. The results of the analyses were consistent with this hypothesis, revealing interactions between the number of words formed by a character and the number of meanings of the character. The implications of these findings were discussed in the context of definitions of orthographic neighbors and theories of word recognition in Chinese.

Semantic effects on the perception of emotional prosody in native and non-native Chinese speakers

While previous research has found an in-group advantage (IGA) favouring native speakers in emotional prosody perception over non-native speakers, the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception remain unclear. This study investigated the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception in Chinese words and sentences for native and non-native Chinese speakers. The critical manipulation was the congruence of prosodic (positive, negative) and semantic (positive, negative, and neutral) valence. Participants listened to a series of audio clips and judged whether the emotional prosody was positive or negative for each utterance. The results revealed an IGA effect: native speakers perceived emotional prosody more accurately and quickly than non-native speakers in Chinese words and sentences. Furthermore, a semantic congruence effect was observed in Chinese words, where both native and non-native speakers recognised emotional prosody more accurately in the semantic-prosody congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. However, in Chinese sentences, this congruence effect was only present for non-native speakers. Additionally, the IGA effect and semantic congruence effect on emotional prosody perception were influenced by prosody valence. These findings illuminate the role of semantics in emotional prosody perception, highlighting perceptual differences between native and non-native Chinese speakers.

Effects of Lexical Properties in L2 Chinese Compound Processing: A Multivariate Approach

Previous studies on L2 (i.e., second language) Chinese compound processing have focused on the relative efficiency of two routes: holistic processing versus combinatorial processing. However, it is still unclear whether Chinese compounds are processed with multilevel representations among L2 learners due to the hierarchical structure of the characters. Therefore, taking a multivariate approach, the present study evaluated the relative influence and importance of different grain sizes of lexical information in an L2 Chinese two-character compound decision task. Results of supervised component generalized linear regression models with random forests analysis revealed that the orthographic, phonological and semantic information all contributed to L2 compound processing, but the L2 learners used more orthographic processing strategies and fewer phonological processing strategies compared to the native speakers. Specifically, the orthographic information was activated at the whole-word, the character and the radical levels in orthographic processing, and the phonological information at the whole-word, the syllable, and the phoneme levels all exerted contributions in phonological processing. Furthermore, the semantic information of the whole words and the constituents was accessed in semantic processing. These findings together suggest that the L2 learners are able to use cues at all levels simultaneously to process Chinese compound words, supporting a multi-route model with a hierarchical morphological structure in such processing.

Electrophysiological evidence of lexical processing impacted by foreign language reading anxiety

Extensive studies have been conducted on the impact of foreign language reading anxiety on reading, primarily focusing on pedagogy and behavior but lacking electrophysiological evidence. The current study aimed to investigate the influence of foreign language reading anxiety on reading and its underlying mechanisms. The results revealed a negative correlation between foreign language reading anxiety and foreign language reading performance, irrespective of the native language. Adults with low levels of foreign language reading anxiety (LFLRA) demonstrated a significant difference in early lexical component N170 amplitude between foreign and native languages. However, this effect was not observed in adults with high levels of foreign language reading anxiety (HFLRA). In terms of N170 latency, HFLRA showed a longer N170 for the foreign language compared to the native language. Furthermore, the N170 effects were predominantly localized over the left occipitotemporal electrodes. Regarding N400 latency, a significant difference was found in LFLRA individuals between foreign and native language processing, while HFLRA individuals did not exhibit this difference. These findings suggest that HFLRA individuals experience inefficient lexical processing (such as orthography or semantics) during reading in foreign language.

The effect of target detection on memory retrieval

Attention and memory are fundamental cognitive processes that closely interact. In the attentional boost effect (ABE), the stimuli that co-occur with targets are remembered better than those that co-occur with distractors in target detection tasks performed during memory encoding. In target detection tasks performed during retrieval, the stimuli that co-occur with targets are recognized as 'old' more easily than the stimuli that co-occur with distractors. This study mainly explored the internal mechanism of the effect of target detection on recognition. In Experiment 1, the full attention (FA; where participants performed only the memory task) condition was used to compare with divided attention (DA; where participants performed target detection while performing memory retrieval) condition to explore the impact of target detection and distraction inhibition on recognition. In Experiment 2, the proportion of old and new words in the retrieval stage was adjusted to 1:1 to eliminate the possible reaction tendency caused by the high proportion of old words. In Experiment 3, the presentation time of words was extended to 1.5 s and 3 s to eliminate the possible impact of rapid processing. The results indicated that the effect of target detection on recognition was attributed to both target detection and distraction rejection and is not affected by the ratio of old and new words and the word presentation time. The effect of target detection on recognition may be owing to temporal yoking of the dual tasks, which is different from the effect of target detection on memory encoding.

LexCHI: A quick lexical test for estimating language proficiency in Chinese

A prominent methodological issue in cognitive research on bilingualism is the lack of consistency in measuring second language (L2) proficiency. To reduce the inconsistency in L2 proficiency measurements, brief and valid vocabulary tests have been developed as an objective measure of proficiency in a variety of languages (e.g., English, French, Spanish). Here, we present LexCHI, a valid lexical test to measure Chinese proficiency. This freely available short test consists of 60 two-character items presented in simplified Chinese. Although it only takes a few minutes to complete LexCHI, the LexCHI scores in two studies correlated significantly with L2 participants' performance in a translation task and a cloze test. We believe that LexCHI is a useful tool for researchers who need to objectively measure Chinese proficiency as part of their investigations.

Comparing word recognition in simplified and traditional Chinese: A megastudy approach

Although it is well established that the visual complexity of a written word can influence processing, it is far less clear from a cross-script perspective, whether the overall visual complexity of the entire written lexicon also affects word recognition. This question can be answered with the data in megastudy of lexical decision in Chinese (MELD-CH), which was developed with over 800 participants responding to 12,587 simplified and traditional Chinese words. The results showed that lexical decision was slower but more accurate in simplified Chinese, which has about 22.5% less strokes, than traditional Chinese. This pattern could not be explained by a speed-accuracy trade-off. Moderate correlations were found in response times and error rates between the two scripts, indicating considerable overlap in processing despite the script difference. In addition, (generalised) linear mixed-effects modelling was used to examine whether the simplified and traditional Chinese groups differed in sensitivity towards linguistic variables. The results showed that the effects of word frequency, word length, and number of strokes were stronger in recognising simplified Chinese words, whereas the effects of number of words formed and number of meanings of the constituent characters were stronger in traditional Chinese. These results suggested that the visual-perceptual processing demands of simplified Chinese might force readers to focus more on local properties of the words, making them less sensitive to global properties that are defined over the entire lexicon. Finally, limitations and alternative explanations of the results were discussed.

A dataset of behavioral measures on Chinese word production in picture naming

Most studies of language production have been conducted with speakers of alphabetic languages, but relatively little research has examined languages with non-alphabetic scripts, such as Chinese. Moreover, most work on language word production has investigated phonological output processing (i.e., speaking), whereas comparatively little research has focused on orthographic output, such as writing and typing. Work on non-alphabetic languages and/or written production is particularly promising, given that it speaks to universalities vs. specificity in terms of architectures and mechanisms underlying language processing across all world languages and modalities. The current article reports a dataset of word production in Chinese with spoken and written responses, which includes reaction times of 193,851 trials of naming 403 pictures obtained from 667 participants across 23 Chinese word production experiments. All data were collected in the same experimental environment and from participants with relatively homogenous characteristics, using the same protocols and parameters. The dataset enables researchers to explore how Chinese speakers produce spoken and/or written words, and to identify language-specific features underlying word production.

CCLOOW: Chinese children's lexicon of oral words

In this article, we introduce the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Oral Words (CCLOOW), the first lexical database based on animated movies and TV series for 3-to-9-year-old Chinese children. The database computes from 2.7 million character tokens and 1.8 million word tokens. It contains 3920 unique character and 22,229 word types. CCLOOW reports frequency and contextual diversity metrics of the characters and words, as well as length and syntactic categories of the words. CCLOOW frequency and contextual diversity measures correlated well with other Chinese lexical databases, particularly well with that computed from children's books. The predictive validity of CCLOOW measures were confirmed with Grade 2 children's naming and lexical decision experiments. Further, we found that CCLOOW frequencies could explain a considerable proportion in adults' written word recognition, indicating that early language experience might have lasting impacts on the mature lexicon. CCLOOW provides validated frequency and contextual diversity estimates that complements current children's lexical database based on written language samples. It is freely accessible online at https://www.learn2read.cn/ccloow .

Frequency effects in linear discriminative learning

Word frequency is a strong predictor in most lexical processing tasks. Thus, any model of word recognition needs to account for how word frequency effects arise. The Discriminative Lexicon Model (DLM) models lexical processing with mappings between words' forms and their meanings. Comprehension and production are modeled via linear mappings between the two domains. So far, the mappings within the model can either be obtained incrementally via error-driven learning, a computationally expensive process able to capture frequency effects, or in an efficient, but frequency-agnostic solution modeling the theoretical endstate of learning (EL) where all words are learned optimally. In the present study we show how an efficient, yet frequency-informed mapping between form and meaning can be obtained (Frequency-informed learning; FIL). We find that FIL well approximates an incremental solution while being computationally much cheaper. FIL shows a relatively low type- and high token-accuracy, demonstrating that the model is able to process most word tokens encountered by speakers in daily life correctly. We use FIL to model reaction times in the Dutch Lexicon Project by means of a Gaussian Location Scale Model and find that FIL predicts well the S-shaped relationship between frequency and the mean of reaction times but underestimates the variance of reaction times for low frequency words. FIL is also better able to account for priming effects in an auditory lexical decision task in Mandarin Chinese, compared to EL. Finally, we used ordered data from CHILDES to compare mappings obtained with FIL and incremental learning. We show that the mappings are highly correlated, but that with FIL some nuances based on word ordering effects are lost. Our results show how frequency effects in a learning model can be simulated efficiently, and raise questions about how to best account for low-frequency words in cognitive models.

Hong Kong Corpus of Chinese Sentence and Passage Reading

Recent years have witnessed a mushrooming of reading corpora that have been built by means of eye tracking. This article showcases the Hong Kong Corpus of Chinese Sentence and Passage Reading (HKC for brevity), featured by a natural reading of logographic scripts and unspaced words. It releases 28 eye-movement measures of 98 native speakers reading simplified Chinese in two scenarios: 300 one-line single sentences and 7 multiline passages of 5,250 and 4,967 word tokens, respectively. To verify its validity and reusability, we carried out (generalised) linear mixed-effects modelling on the capacity of visual complexity, word frequency, and reading scenario to predict eye-movement measures. The outcomes manifest significant impacts of these typical (sub)lexical factors on eye movements, replicating previous findings and giving novel ones. The HKC provides a valuable resource for exploring eye movement control; the study contrasts the different scenarios of single-sentence and passage reading in hopes of shedding new light on both the universal nature of reading and the unique characteristics of Chinese reading.

The Chinese Lexicon Project II: A megastudy of speeded naming performance for 25,000+ traditional Chinese two-character words

Using a megastudy approach, (Tse et al., 2017 Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1503-1519) established a large-scale repository of lexical variables and lexical decision responses for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese two-character words. In the current study, we expand their database by collecting norms for speeded naming reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates, and compiling more lexical variables (e.g., phonological consistency and semantic neighborhood size). Following Tse et al.'s procedure, about 33 college-aged native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong read aloud each word. We conducted item-level regression analyses to test the relative predictive power of orthographic variables (e.g., stroke count), phonological variables (e.g., phonological consistency), and semantic variables (e.g., semantic transparency) in naming performance. We also compared the effects of lexical variables on naming performance and Tse et al.'s lexical decision performance to examine the extent to which effects are task-specific or task-general. Freely accessible to the research community, this resource provides a valuable addition to other influential mega-databases, such as the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2004 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283-316), and furthers our understanding of Chinese word recognition processes.

Hong Kong Chinese character psycholinguistic norms: ratings of 4376 single Chinese characters on semantic radical transparency, age-of-acquisition, familiarity, imageability, and concreteness

Several norms of psycholinguistic features of Chinese characters exist in Mandarin Chinese, but only a few are available in Cantonese or in the traditional script, and none includes semantic radical transparency ratings. This study presents subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), familiarity, imageability, concreteness, and semantic radical transparency in 4376 Chinese characters. The single Chinese characters were rated individually on the five dimensions by 20 native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong to form the Hong Kong Chinese Character Psycholinguistic Norms (HKCCPN). The split-half reliability and intra-class correlations testified to the high internal reliability of the ratings. Their convergent and discriminant patterns in relations to other psycholinguistic measures echoed previous findings reported on Chinese. There were high correlations for semantic radical transparency, imageability and concreteness, and moderate-to-high correlations for AoA and familiarity among subsets of items that had been collected in previous studies. Concurrent validity analyses showed convergence in predicting behavioral response times in various tasks (lexical decision, naming, and writing-to-dictation) when compared with other Chinese character databases. High predictive validity was shown in writing-to-dictation data from an independent sample of 20 native Cantonese speakers. Several objective psycholinguistic measures (character frequency, stroke number, number of words formed, number of homophones and number of meanings) were included in this database to facilitate its use. These new ratings extend the currently available norms in language and reading research in Cantonese Chinese for researchers, clinicians, and educators, as well as provide them with a wider choice of stimuli.

A large-scale database of Chinese characters and words collected from elementary school textbooks

Lexical databases are essential tools for studies on language processing and acquisition. Most previous Chinese lexical databases have focused on materials for adults, yet little is known about reading materials for children and how lexical properties from these materials affect children's reading comprehension. In the present study, we provided the first large database of 2999 Chinese characters and 2182 words collected from the official textbooks recently issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People's Republic of China for most elementary schools in Mainland China, as well as norms from both school-aged children and adults. The database incorporates key orthographic, phonological, and semantic factors from these lexical units. A word-naming task was used to investigate the effects of these factors in character and word processing in both adults and children. The results suggest that: (1) as the grade level increases, visual complexity of those characters and words increases whereas semantic richness and frequency decreases; (2) the effects of lexical predictors on processing both characters and words vary across children and adults; (3) the effect of age of acquisition shows different patterns on character and word-naming performance. The database is available on Open Science Framework (OSF) ( https://osf.io/ynk8c/?view_only=5186bd68549340bd923e9b6531d2c820 ) for future studies on Chinese language development.

Morphological decomposition in Chinese compound word recognition: Electrophysiological evidence

The present study examined the effect of both morphological complexity and semantic transparency in Chinese compound word recognition. Using a visual lexical decision task, our electrophysiological results showed that transparent and opaque compounds induced stronger Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) than monomorphemic words. This result suggests that Chinese compounds might be decomposed into their constituent morphemes at the lemma level, whereas monomorphemic words are accessed as a whole-word lemma directly from the form level. In addition, transparent and opaque compounds produced a similar N400 as each other, suggesting that transparency did not show an effect on the involvement of constituent morphemes during access to the whole-word lemma. Two behavioral experiments additionally showed similar patterns to the EEG results. These findings support morphological decomposition for compounds at the lemma level as proposed by the full-parsing model, and no evidence is found to support the role of transparency during Chinese compound word recognition.

Visual event-related potentials reveal the early whole-word lexical processing of Chinese two-character words

Morphologically complex words are common across different languages, especially in Chinese, because more than 90% of common modern Chinese words are complex words. Many behavioral studies have suggested the whole-word processing of Chinese complex words, but the neural correlates of whole-word processing remain unclear. Previous electrophysiological studies revealed automatic and early (∼250 ms) access to the orthographic forms of monomorphic words in the ventral occipitotemporal area. In this study, we investigated whether there is also automatic and early orthographic recognition of Chinese complex words (as whole units) by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). A total of 150 two-character words and 150 two-character pseudowords composed of the same 300 characters (morphemes) were pseudorandomly presented to proficient Chinese readers. Participants were required to determine the color of each stimulus in the color decision task and to determine whether each stimulus was a word in the lexical decision task. The two constituent characters of each stimulus were horizontally arranged in Experiment 1 and vertically arranged in Experiment 2. The results revealed a significant early ERP difference between words and pseudowords approximately 250-300 ms after stimulus onset in the parieto-occipital scalp region. The early ERP difference was more prominent in the color decision task than in the lexical decision task, more prominent in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, and more prominent in the left parieto-occipital scalp region than in the right. Source analysis results showed that the early ERP difference originated from the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These results reflected early and automatic access to whole-word orthographic representations of Chinese complex words in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex.

Familiarity ratings for 24,325 simplified Chinese words

The present work collected familiarity norms for 20,275 two-character, 1231 three-character, and 2819 four-character simplified Chinese words from 1300 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The familiarity of each word was rated on a 7-point scale by at least 21 participants. The results supported the reliability and validity of the present familiarity ratings, which is the first large familiarity database for Chinese in the field. These familiarity norms can be downloaded from the supplemental materials. Furthermore, the contribution of familiarity to Chinese lexical processing was investigated using the present familiarity ratings and previous data (lexical features and visual lexical decision), mainly from two major Chinese lexicon projects, MELD-SCH and CLP. Regression analysis suggests that familiarity explained a substantial percentage of the variance in lexical processing of both simplified and traditional Chinese words, over and above the effects of word frequency and other lexical features, including age of acquisition (AoA). Further analysis identified a significantly greater familiarity effect for lower-frequency words than that for higher-frequency words. Together, among the first, our findings support the important contribution of familiarity with Chinese words to lexical processing, especially for low-frequency words.

Encoding category-level and context-specific phonological information at different stages: An EEG study of Mandarin third-tone sandhi word production

Pronunciation of words or morphemes may vary systematically in different phonological contexts, but it remains unclear how different levels of phonological information are encoded in speech production. In this study, we investigated the online planning process of Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) sandhi, a case of phonological alternation whereby a low-dipping tone (T3) changes to a Tone 2 (T2)-like rising tone when followed by another T3. To examine the time course of the encoding of the abstract category-level (underlying form) and context-specific phonological form (surface form) of T3, we conducted an electroencephalographic (EEG) study with a phonologically-primed picture naming task and examined the event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the stimulus onset as well as speech response onset. The behavioral results showed that targets primed by T3 or T2 primes yielded shorter naming latencies than those primed by control primes. Importantly, the EEG data revealed that T3 primes elicited larger positive amplitude over broad frontocentral regions roughly in the 320-550 ms time window of stimulus-locked ERP and -500 to -400 ms time window of response-locked ERP, whereas T2 primes elicited larger negative amplitude over left frontocentral regions roughly in the -240 to -100 ms time window of response-locked ERP. These results indicate that the underlying and the surface form are encoded at different processing stages. The former presumably occurs in the earlier phonological encoding stage, while the latter probably occurs in the later phonetic encoding or motor preparation stage. The current study offers important implications for understanding the processing of phonological alternations and tonal encoding in Chinese word production.

CCLOWW: A grade-level Chinese children's lexicon of written words

In this article, we present the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Written Words (CCLOWW), the first grade-level database that provides frequency statistics of simplified Chinese characters and words for children. The database computes from a corpus of 34,671,424 character tokens and 22,427,010 word tokens (including single- and multicharacter words), extracted from 2131 books. It contains 6746 different character types and 153,079 different word types. CCLOWW provides several frequency indices of simplified Chinese for three grade levels (grade 2 and below, grades 3-4, grades 5-6) to profile children's experience with written Chinese in and outside of school. We describe in this article the distributions of frequency and contextual diversity of the characters and words, as well as word length and syntactic categories of the words in the corpus and the subcorpora. We also report results of correlation analyses with other written corpora and of several naming and lexicon decision experiments. The findings suggest that CCLOWW frequency measures correlate well with other corpora. Importantly, they could reliably predict children's and adults' naming and lexical decision performances. They could also explain variance in adults' visual word recognition, in addition to frequency measures computed in an adult corpus, indicating that early print exposure might influence readers' lexical processing later on beyond an age of acquisition effect. CCLOWW will help researchers in language processing and development as well as educators with selecting language materials appropriate for children's developmental stages. The database is freely available online at https://www.learn2read.cn/database/ .

The Extended Simple View of Reading in Adult Learners of Chinese as a Second Language

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) designates that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and listening comprehension and this conclusion has been supported by studies on school-aged native and nonnative speakers. However, it remains unknown whether SVR can be applied to adult second language (L2) learners. The current study addressed this issue by testing adult learners of Chinese as a second language with various proficiency levels and further extended the model by including word segmentation and word-meaning access, both of which are particularly crucial in reading Chinese. The results showed that listening comprehension only contributed to reading comprehension for the advanced learners, while decoding accuracy predicted reading comprehension regardless of Chinese proficiency. However, the total proportion of variance accounted for was relatively low, especially for the lower proficiency groups. Interestingly, word segmentation and word-meaning access explained a large proportion of the total variance and concomitantly decreased the apparent influence of word decoding. Taken together, these findings highlight that the individual characteristics of a given language can modulate the contributions of decoding and listening comprehension to predicting reading comprehension.

An ERP megastudy of Chinese word recognition

This article reports the first ERP (event-related potential) megastudy in traditional Chinese word recognition. Fifty-one native Chinese undergraduates in Hong Kong, who were native Cantonese speakers, provided ERP data to 1020 two-character words and 204 two-character pseudowords in a go/no-go lexical decision task (go trials: pseudowords). The item list and the ERP data were compiled into a database called "E-MELD" (ERP MEgastudy of Lexical Decision). To illustrate how E-MELD can be utilized in research of traditional Chinese word recognition, a series of linear mixed-effects (LME) models were conducted to examine how properties at word (contextual diversity, number of strokes, and concreteness) and character (contextual diversity, number of homophones, and semantic transparency ratings) levels influenced the ERP amplitudes in different time windows. The results showed that in all time windows, both word and character variables influenced the amplitudes of ERP signals, which argued against the proposal that Chinese two-character words are recognized holistically. At the same time, there was no evidence that character effects preceded word effects (i.e., no evidence of character-mediated word recognition). Overall, the pattern suggests that characters and words are accessed simultaneously in Chinese word recognition. E-MELD is made available online, such that interested researchers can download it and use the data innovatively for their research purpose.

Database of word-level statistics for Mandarin Chinese (DoWLS-MAN)

In this article we present the Database of Word-Level Statistics for Mandarin Chinese (DoWLS-MAN). The database addresses the lack of agreement in phonological syllable segmentation specific to Mandarin by offering phonological features for each lexical item according to 16 schematic representations of the syllable (8 with tone and 8 without tone). Those lexical statistics that differ per phonological word and nonword due to changes in syllable segmentation are of the variant category and include subtitle lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density measures, homophone density, and network science measures. The invariant characteristics consist of each items' lexical tone, phonological transcription, and syllable structure among others. The goal of DoWLS-MAN is to provide researchers both the ability to choose stimuli that are derived from a segmentation schema that supports an existing model of Mandarin speech processing, and the ability to choose stimuli that allow for the testing of hypotheses on phonological segmentation according to multiple schemas. In an exploratory analysis we illustrate how multiple schematic representations of the phonological mental lexicon can aid in hypothesis generation, specifically in terms of phonological processing when reading Chinese orthography. Users of the database can search among over 92,000 words, over 1600 out-of-vocabulary Chinese characters, and 4300 phonological nonwords according to either Chinese orthography, pinyin, or ASCII phonetic script. Users can also generate a list of phonological words and nonwords according to user-defined ranges and categories of lexical characteristics. DoWLS-MAN is available to the public for search or download at https://dowls.site .

Languages are efficient, but for whom?

Human languages evolve to make communication more efficient. But efficiency creates trade-offs: what is efficient for speakers is not always efficient for comprehenders. How do languages balance these competing pressures? We focus on Zipf's meaning-frequency law, the observation that frequent wordforms have more meanings. On the one hand, this law could reflect a speaker-oriented pressure to reuse frequent wordforms. Yet human languages still maintain thousands of distinct wordforms, suggesting a countervailing, comprehender-oriented pressure. What balance of these pressures produces Zipf's meaning-frequency law? Using a neutral baseline, we find that frequent wordforms in real lexica have fewer homophones than predicted by their phonotactic structure: real lexica favor a comprehender-oriented pressure to reduce the cost of frequent disambiguation. These results help clarify the evolutionary drive for efficiency: human languages are subject to competing pressures for efficient communication, the relative magnitudes of which reveal how individual-level cognitive constraints shape languages over time.

From words to phrases: neural basis of social event semantic composition

Events are typically composed of at least actions and entities. Both actions and entities have been shown to be represented by neural structures respecting domain organizations in the brain, including those of social/animate (face and body; person-directed action) versus inanimate (man-made object or tool; object-directed action) concepts. It is unclear whether the brain combines actions and entities into events in a (relative) domain-specific fashion or via domain-general mechanisms in regions that have been shown to support semantic and syntactic composition. We tested these hypotheses in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment where two domains of verb-noun event phrases (social-person versus manipulation-artifact, e.g., “hug mother” versus “fold napkin”) and their component words were contrasted. We found a series of brain region supporting social-composition effects more strongly than the manipulation phrase composition—the bilateral inferior occipital gyrus (IOG), inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) and anterior temporal lobe (ATL)—which either showed stronger activation strength tested by univariate contrast, stronger content representation tested by representation similarity analysis, or stronger relationship between the neural activation patterns of phrases and synthesis (additive and multiplication) of the neural activity patterns of the word constituents. No regions were observed showing evidence of phrase composition for both domains or stronger effects of manipulation phrases. These findings highlight the roles of the visual cortex and ATL in social event compositions, suggesting a domain-preferring, rather than domain-general, mechanisms of verbal event composition.

The Roles of Consonant, Rime, and Tone in Mandarin Spoken Word Recognition: An Eye-Tracking Study

This study investigated the relative role of sub-syllabic components (initial consonant, rime, and tone) in spoken word recognition of Mandarin Chinese using an eye-tracking experiment with a visual world paradigm. Native Mandarin speakers (all born and grew up in Beijing) were presented with four pictures and an auditory stimulus. They were required to click the picture according to the sound stimulus they heard, and their eye movements were tracked during this process. For a target word (e.g., tang2 "candy"), nine conditions of competitors were constructed in terms of the amount of their phonological overlap with the target: consonant competitor (e.g., ti1 "ladder"), rime competitor (e.g., lang4 "wave"), tone competitor (e.g., niu2 "cow"), consonant plus rime competitor (e.g., tang1"soup"), consonant plus tone competitor (e.g., tou2 "head"), rime plus tone competitor (e.g., yang2 "sheep"), cohort competitor (e.g., ta3 "tower"), cohort plus tone competitor (e.g., tao2 "peach"), and baseline competitor (e.g., xue3 "snow"). A growth curve analysis was conducted with the fixation to competitors, targets, and distractors, and the results showed that (1) competitors with consonant or rime overlap can be adequately activated, while tone overlap plays a weaker role since additional tonal information can strengthen the competitive effect only when it was added to a candidate that already bears much phonological similarity with the target. (2) Mandarin words are processed in an incremental way in the time course of word recognition since different partially overlapping competitors could be activated immediately; (3) like the pattern found in English, both cohort and rime competitors were activated to compete for lexical activation, but these two competitors were not temporally distinctive and mainly differed in the size of their competitive effects. Generally, the gradation of activation based on the phonological similarity between target and candidates found in this study was in line with the continuous mapping models and may reflect a strategy of native speakers shaped by the informative characteristics of the interaction among different sub-syllabic components.

Simplification Is Not Dominant in the Evolution of Chinese Characters

Linguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than half a million images of Chinese characters spanning more than 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simplification through time, and contrary to popular belief we find that modern Chinese characters are higher in visual complexity than their earliest known counterparts. One plausible explanation for our findings is that simplicity trades off with distinctiveness, and that characters have become less simple because of pressures towards distinctiveness. Our findings are therefore compatible with functional accounts of language but highlight the diverse and sometimes counterintuitive ways in which linguistic systems are shaped by pressures for communicative efficiency.

The nature of perceptual units in Chinese character recognition

Chinese character recognition is based on a limited set of recurrent stroke patterns. Most Chinese characters are a combination of two or more of these components. To test whether readers are sensitive to combinations of components (or multi-component units [MCUs]) within a character, we conducted two probe detection tasks where participants had to detect the presence of a component in a target character. Critically, some targets contained an MCU that can stand as a character on its own, with its own meaning and sound, while other targets contained an MCU that only exists embedded within other characters (no associated meaning and sound). Participants had more difficulty detecting component probes that were a part of an existing MCU, compared to component probes that belonged to a non-existing MCU. These findings suggest that existing MCUs are a perceptual unit in Chinese character recognition.

Linguistic emergence from a networks approach: The case of modern Chinese two-character words

The models of linguistic networks and their analytical tools constitute a potential methodology for investigating the formation of structural patterns in actual language use. Research with this methodology has just started, which can hopefully shed light on the emergent nature of linguistic structure. This study attempts to employ linguistic networks to investigate the formation of modern Chinese two-character words (as structural units based on the chunking of their component characters) in the actual use of modern Chinese, which manifests itself as continuous streams of Chinese characters. Network models were constructed based on authentic Chinese language data, with Chinese characters as nodes, their co-occurrence relations as directed links, and the co-occurrence frequencies as link weights. Quantitative analysis of the network models has shown that a Chinese two-character word can highlight itself as a two-node island, i.e., a cohesive sub-network with its two component characters co-occurring more frequently than they co-occur with the other characters. This highlighting mechanism may play a vital role in the formation and acquisition of two-character words in actual language use. Moreover, this mechanism may also throw some light on the emergence of other structural phenomena (with the chunking of specific linguistic units as their basis).

Idiosyncratic Tower of Babel: Individual Differences in Word-Meaning Representation Increase as Word Abstractness Increases

Humans primarily rely on language to communicate, on the basis of a shared understanding of the basic building blocks of communication: words. Do we mean the same things when we use the same words? Although cognitive neural research on semantics has revealed the common principles of word-meaning representation, the factors underlying the potential individual variations in word meanings are unknown. Here, we empirically characterized the intersubject consistency of 90 words across 20 adult subjects (10 female) using both behavioral measures (rating-based semantic-relationship patterns) and neuroimaging measures (word-evoked brain activity patterns). Across both the behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, we showed that the magnitude of individual disagreements on word meanings could be modeled on the basis of how much language or sensory experience is associated with a word and that this variation increases with word abstractness. Uncovering the cognitive and neural origins of word-meaning disagreements across individuals has implications for potential mechanisms to modulate such disagreements.

Shabd: A psycholinguistic database for Hindi

We present Shabd, a psycholinguistic database in Hindi. It is based on a corpus of 1.4 billion words from electronic newspapers and news websites. Word frequencies and part of speech information have been derived and are made available in a cleaned list of 34 thousand hand-selected words, and a list of 96 thousand words observed with a frequency of more than 100 times in the corpus. Next to the Shabd database, we also make a list with all 2.3 million word types available and a list with the 2.5 million most frequent word pairs (word bigrams). The quality of the word frequency measure was tested in two lexical decision tasks. We observed that the Shabd word frequencies outperform existing frequencies based on smaller corpora of newspapers but not the Worldlex word frequencies based on an analysis of blogs. We also observed that word frequency accounts for as much variance as contextual diversity (operationalized as the number of documents in which the words were observed). The Shabd database is freely available for research.

Predictability eliminates neighborhood effects during Chinese sentence reading

Previous research has demonstrated effects of both orthographic neighborhood size and neighbor frequency in word recognition in Chinese. A large neighborhood-where neighborhood size is defined by the number of words that differ from a target word by a single character-appears to facilitate word recognition, while the presence of a higher-frequency neighbor has an inhibitory effect. The present study investigated modulation of these effects by a word's predictability in context. In two eye-movement experiments, the predictability of a target word in each sentence was manipulated. Target words differed in their neighborhood size (Experiment 1) and in whether they had a higher-frequency neighbor (Experiment 2). The study replicated the previously observed effects of neighborhood size and neighbor frequency when the target word was unpredictable, but in both experiments neighborhood effects were absent when the target was predictable. These results suggest that when a word is preactivated by context, the activation of its neighbors may be diminished to such an extent that these neighbors do not effectively compete for selection.

An eye-tracking study of reading long and short novel and lexicalized compound words

An eye-tracking experiment examined the recognition of novel and lexicalized compound words during sentence reading. The frequency of the head noun in modifier-head compound words was manipulated to tap into the degree of compositional processing. This was done separately for long (12-16 letter) and short (7-9 letters) compound words. Based on the dual-route race model [Pollatsek et al., 4] and the visual acuity principle [Bertram & Hyönä, 2], long lexicalized and novel compound words were predicted to be processed via the decomposition route and short lexicalized compound words via the holistic route. Gaze duration and selective regression-path duration demonstrated a constituent frequency effect of similar size for long lexicalized and novel compound words. For short compound words the constituent frequency effect was negligible for lexicalized words but robust for novel words. The results are consistent with the visual acuity principle that assumes long novel compound words to be recognized via the decomposition route and short lexicalized compound words via the holistic route.

Audio-Visual Causality and Stimulus Reliability Affect Audio-Visual Synchrony Perception

People can discriminate the synchrony between audio-visual scenes. However, the sensitivity of audio-visual synchrony perception can be affected by many factors. Using a simultaneity judgment task, the present study investigated whether the synchrony perception of complex audio-visual stimuli was affected by audio-visual causality and stimulus reliability. In Experiment 1, the results showed that audio-visual causality could increase one's sensitivity to audio-visual onset asynchrony (AVOA) of both action stimuli and speech stimuli. Moreover, participants were more tolerant of AVOA of speech stimuli than that of action stimuli in the high causality condition, whereas no significant difference between these two kinds of stimuli was found in the low causality condition. In Experiment 2, the speech stimuli were manipulated with either high or low stimulus reliability. The results revealed a significant interaction between audio-visual causality and stimulus reliability. Under the low causality condition, the percentage of “synchronous” responses of audio-visual intact stimuli was significantly higher than that of visual_intact/auditory_blurred stimuli and audio-visual blurred stimuli. In contrast, no significant difference among all levels of stimulus reliability was observed under the high causality condition. Our study supported the synergistic effect of top-down processing and bottom-up processing in audio-visual synchrony perception.

Compound word frequency modifies the effect of character frequency in reading Chinese

In two eye-tracking studies, reading of two-character Chinese compound words was examined. First and second character frequency were orthogonally manipulated to examine the extent to which Chinese compound words are processed via the component characters. In Experiment 1, first and second character frequency were manipulated for frequent compound words, whereas in Experiment 2 it was done for infrequent compound words. Fixation time and skipping probability for the first and second character were affected by its frequency in neither experiment, nor in their pooled analysis. Yet, in Experiment 2 fixations on the second character were longer when a high-frequency character was presented as the first character compared with when a low-frequency character was presented as the first character. This reversed character frequency effect reflects a morphological family size effect and is explained by the constraint hypothesis, according to which fixation time on the second component of two-component compound words is shorter when its identity is constrained by the first component. It is concluded that frequent Chinese compound words are processed holistically, whereas with infrequent compound words there is some room for the characters to play a role in the identification process.

The role of information theory for compound words in Mandarin Chinese and English

We investigate the role of information-theoretic measures for compound word reading in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and English. For each language, we report the results of two analyses: a time-to-event analysis using piece-wise additive mixed models (PAMMs) and a causal inference analysis with causal additive models (CAMs). We use the PAMM analyses to gain insight into the temporal profile of the effects of information-theoretic measures in the word naming task. For both English and Mandarin Chinese, we report early effects of the entropy of both constituents, as well as temporally widespread effects of point-wise mutual information (PMI). The CAM analyses provide further insight into the relations between lexical-distributional variables. The image that emerges from the CAM analyses is that the information-theoretic measures entropy and PMI are embedded in a carefully balanced system in which lexical-distributional properties that lead to processing difficulties are offset by lexical-distributional properties that guarantee successful communication. The information-theoretic measures have a central position in this system, and are causally influenced not only by frequency, but also by the effects of other lower-level lexical-distributional variables such as visual complexity, and phonology to orthography consistency.

Individual differences in Cantonese Chinese word recognition: Insights from the Chinese Lexicon Project

The Chinese Lexicon Project is a repository of lexical decision data for 25,286 Cantonese Chinese two-character compound words. To create that repository, 594 participants responded to approximately 1,404 words and 1,404 nonwords over three sessions. Using the data in this repository, the present study examines the variability and reliability of Chinese lexical decision performance, along with the moderating influence of individual differences on lexical processing. We generally found high to very high within- and between-session reliabilities for mean response times, ex-Gaussian parameters, accuracy rates, and a composite proficiency measure tapping lexical processing fluency. Using linear mixed effects models, we also found reliable interactions between fluency and two lexical effects. Specifically, more fluent readers showed larger effects of word frequency and semantic transparency. These results attest to the stability of Chinese word recognition performance, and are most consistent with a flexible lexical processing system that adapts optimally to task demands.