Psychological Reality of the Word in Chinese

Abstract

While the notion of the word is relatively clear to ordinary English speakers, it is not so to the Chinese. Word boundaries, as distinct from morpheme boundaries, are not marked in Chinese text. A lot of disagreement as to word boundaries in quite simple sentences is found amongst Chinese students. Psychological correlates of this fuzziness in the concept of the word and salience of the character in multi-character words are reviewed, including perceptual, eye-movement, and memory phenomena. The nature of the lexicon in Chinese is discussed