Influences of Splittability and Character Type on Processing of Chinese Two-Character Verb–Object Constructions

It is theoretically accepted that Chinese two-character words (2C-words) are processed both holistically and according to their constituent characters. Given the evidence on readers’ sensitivities to the syntactic relationships between the constituent characters, however, this general view might not fully explain the 2C-word processing mechanism. As an important category of 2C-words, verb–object constructions (VOCs) exhibit significant heterogeneity in splittability, the degree of syntactic phrasalization through the insertion of other characters between the constituent characters. To examine skilled readers’ VOC processing under the influences of splittability and whether the constituent characters are bound or free characters (character type), two experiments were conducted on a cohort of college students, who were Chinese native speakers, using the lexical decision task in a repetition priming paradigm. The prime stimuli (primer type) comprised three conditions: (a) the targets themselves, (b) the targets’ transposed non-words, and (c) non-linguistic baseline symbols ‘※※’. The primers’ two constituents were presented simultaneously and sequentially in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. A significant interaction was revealed across both experiments between splittability and character type in the participants’ performance. The main effect was significant for primer type in the participants’ performance in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2, however, the interaction was significant both between primer type and splittability in the participants’ performance and between primer type and character type in their reaction times. In addition to confirming the general view, skilled readers might inevitably experience syntactic and semantic combinations of the constituent characters in their processing of VOCs.