Morphology, orthography, and phonology in reading Chinese compound words

The interaction between morphological, orthographic. and phonological infor mation in reading Chinese compound words was investigated in five sets of e xperiments, using both masked priming and visual-visual priming lexical dec ision tasks. Words sharing common morphemes mere consistently found to faci litate each other, although the priming effects were modulated by spatial o verlap of orthographic forms in masked priming. Priming effects were also f ound for words having homographic-homophonic characters, but the effect ten ded to be inhibitory when the SOA between primes and targets was long and w hen the competing morphemes corresponding to the characters were at the ini tial constituent position of primes and targets.Priming effects between wor ds having homographic but non-homophonic characters were more inhibitory, c ompared with effects between words having homographic-homophonic characters . Words having orthographically different homophonic morphemes did not prim e each other throughout the experiments. The results were discussed in term s of how lexical representations incorporate morphological structure and ho w morphological, orthographic, and phonological information interacts in co nstraining semantic activation of constituent morphemes and compound words.