| Funding Scheme : |
General Research Fund |
| Project Number : |
18611725 |
| Project Title(English) : |
What is a Chinese word? A large-scale behavioral experiment |
| Project Title(Chinese) : |
有關中文詞彙判斷的大型行為研究 |
| Principal Investigator(English) : |
Dr Wang, Jie |
| Principal Investigator(Chinese) : |
|
| Department : |
Department of Psychology |
| Institution : |
The Education University of Hong Kong |
| Co - Investigator(s) : |
|
Dr Chang, Ya-Ning
|
|
Prof Chen, Hsuan-Chih
|
|
Prof Cheung, Him
|
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Dr Tsang, Yiu Kei
|
|
| Panel : |
Humanities, Social Sciences |
| Subject Area : |
Psychology and Linguistics |
| Exercise Year : |
2025 / 26 |
| Fund Approved : |
746,600 |
| Project Status : |
On-going
|
| Completion Date : |
31-12-2028 |
Abstract as per original application
(English/Chinese): |
Due to the characteristics of written Chinese, it is sometimes ambiguous how to segment a sequence of Chinese characters into words (e.g., “一眼” may be considered as two single-character words “一” and “眼”, or a two-character word). The proposed study will investigate how Chinese characters and words are represented in the mental lexicon, by using a large-scale behavioral experiment and computational modeling. Thousands of native Chinese readers across a wide age range (from 16 to above 50 years old) and various education levels (from middle school to graduate school) will complete a lexical decision task online via the WeChat platform. The full set of stimuli includes more than 34,000 Chinese two-character words and a comparable number of nonwords (i.e., arbitrary combinations of two characters). Participants’ response accuracy and reaction time will be submitted to computational modeling, in order to comprehensively explore both item-level and individual-level factors influencing the weightings of combinatorial and holistic processing routes in Chinese visual word recognition. The results of this study will advance our understanding of the nature of Chinese words, from a psycholinguistic perspective. In terms of practical contribution, a large database of Chinese lexical decision will be generated, which will provide recognition difficulty of most Chinese two-character words and can be used by teachers and test developers of Chinese literacy.
由於中文的特性，對一連串中文字進行詞彙切分時常存在歧義（例如『一眼』可作为兩個單字詞『一』和『眼』，或一個雙字詞）。本研究將透過大規模行為實驗與計算模型，探討中文字詞在心理詞典中的表徵方式。數千名母語為中文的參與者（16歲至50歲以上，中學至研究生學歷）將透過微信平臺完成一項線上詞彙判斷任務。實驗材料包含約34,000個中文雙字詞及同等數量的非詞（即任意組合的中文雙字）。參與者的反應正確率與反應時間將導入計算模型，以全面探討影響中文詞彙辨識中組合式加工與整體式加工之路徑權重的材料及個體相關因素。本研究結果將從心理語言學角度深化對中文詞彙本質的理解。同時，研究中建立的大型資料庫將提供多數中文雙字詞的識別難度指標，可供漢語教學者及中文測驗開發者運用。
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| Research Outcome |
Layman's Summary of
Completion Report: |
Not yet submitted
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