Plausibility and Syntactic Reanalysis in Processing Novel Noun-noun Combinations During Chinese Reading: Evidence From Native and Non-native Speakers

Mechanism of semantic processing of lexicalized and novel compound words: An eye movement study.

“…In addition, they found a reversed plausibility effect in the second noun region, where gaze duration and total time were significantly longer in the plausible condition than in the implausible condition. The results of Yao et al (2022) suggest that Chinese novel compound words are integrated with previous contexts in a decompositional manner.…”

“…In addition, they found a reversed plausibility effect in the second noun region, where gaze duration and total time were significantly longer in the plausible condition than in the implausible condition. The results of Yao et al (2022) suggest that Chinese novel compound words are integrated with previous contexts in a decompositional manner. To make a brief summary, previous studies showed that Chinese readers usually integrate two-and three-character lexicalized compound words at the whole word level instead of the constituent level.…”

“…Second, although Yao et al (2022) shed some light on the semantic integration of novel compound words, much less is known about the processing of novel compound words compared to lexicalized compound words. Yao et al’s (2022) finding might not reflect the general processing of novel compound words when we consider the word length issue mentioned above (i.e., two-character novel compounds word may show a different pattern of results).…”

“…Second, although Yao et al (2022) shed some light on the semantic integration of novel compound words, much less is known about the processing of novel compound words compared to lexicalized compound words. Yao et al’s (2022) finding might not reflect the general processing of novel compound words when we consider the word length issue mentioned above (i.e., two-character novel compounds word may show a different pattern of results). Moreover, Yao et al (2022) used classifiers to manipulate the plausibility of the first constituent, which is hard to compare their results with previous studies that used verbs for this manipulation (Staub et al, 2007; Yang et al, 2012; J.…”

“…Zhou & Li, 2021) were all lexicalized compound words. Regarding how novel compound words are integrated with context in Chinese reading, Yao et al (2022) used novel four-character noun-noun Chinese compound words to examine this question. They manipulated the temporary plausibility of the first noun by varying the classifier before the compound word (see Examples 2a, 2b, the word space is only for illustration and is not presented in the original study).…”