Constituent‐morpheme priming: Implications from the morphology of two‐kanji compound words

要旨

Abstract: The diversity in the morphological structure of two-kanji compound words is a matter of special concern for models of the Japanese mental lexicon. This study discusses two proposals for models of the Japanese mental lexicon –Hirose’s (1992, 1994, 1996) hypotheses and a Japanese lemma-unit version of the multilevel interactive-activation framework – in terms of their ability to cope with this diversity. As the proposals make different predictions concerning constituent-morpheme priming, patterns of facilitation were examined in two experiments with five word-formation principles as experimental conditions. Experiment 1, using the long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 3000 ms employed by Hirose (1992), only found significant differences between the first- and second-element conditions in one of the word-formation conditions. Experiment 2, using a short SOA of 250 ms, confirmed the pattern of priming obtained in Experiment 1. These results are more consistent with the prediction from the Japanese lemma-unit model.

主題