Lexical processing in simplified Chinese: an investigation using a new large-scale lexical database

Abstract

This dissertation presents a new large-scale lexical database for simplified Chinese, the Chinese Lexical Database (CLD). The CLD contains a large number of categorical and numerical lexical variables for 30,000 one and two character words, and can be used for the design and analysis of psycholinguistic experiments in simplified Chinese. The predictive power of the lexical variables in the CLD is explored through two experiments: a word naming experiment and a phrase reading experiment. The analysis of the experimental data revealed effects of a wide range of lexical predictors on lexical processing at the character level, the word level, and the phrase level - including hitherto unobserved effects of information-theoretic measures that describe the combinatorial properties of linguistic units.