Background: There are divergent viewpoints on how Chinese compound words undergo morphological processing—especially regarding the role and timing of morphemic semantics during word recognition. Whether—and in what way—lexical and sublexical semantics influence the recognition of Chinese compound words remains unclear; this issue is central to the debate between form-then-meaning and form-and-meaning processing models. Method: We investigated morphological effects on compound processing by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) to Chinese compound targets that were preceded by five prime types: W+M+, W–M+, W–M– (W = whole-word semantics, M = morphemic meaning, “+” = congruent, “–” = incongruent), a purely semantic prime, and an unrelated prime. This design simultaneously controlled prime-target relatedness at both the morphemic and whole-word levels. Results: The results showed that, across both the 100–300 ms and 300–500 ms windows, the W–M+ and W–M– conditions produced statistically equivalent priming effects, suggesting that the semantic content of individual morphemes contributes only minimally to recognizing the compound as a whole. Conclusions: These findings align more closely with morphological models proposing parallel processing of form and meaning, as opposed to frameworks that assume a strictly hierarchical or step-by-step sequence.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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