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The Temporal Course of Semantic Access in Spoken Chinese Disyllabic Compound Comprehension

Haibin Han, Tingyang Shang

Advances in Linguistics Research / 2026,8(2): 205-217 / 2026-06-24 18 15

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• Information:

  Department of Psychology, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China

• Keywords:
  Spoken Word; Chinese Compounds; Semantic Access; Morphological Processing; Eye Tracking
• Abstract: This study investigated the time course of semantic access during the comprehension of spoken Chinese disyllabic compound words. Using a printed-word version of the Visual World Paradigm (PW-VWP), participants’ eye movements were recorded while they listened to spoken compounds and viewed four printedword conditions: first-morpheme related, second-morpheme related, whole-word related, and an unrelated baseline. Results showed that during the early processing window (0-800 ms), only the first-morphemerelated condition elicited significantly higher fixation probabilities than the unrelated baseline, whereas second-morpheme and whole-word effects were absent. In the subsequent stage (1200-2000 ms), both secondmorpheme and whole-word effects emerged, with the whole-word-related condition eliciting the highest fixation probabilities. These findings indicate a clear temporal progression in semantic activation during spoken Chinese compound word processing, from an early first-morpheme-driven decomposition phase to a later stage characterized by parallel activation, with whole-word access exerting a dominant influence. The results provide evidence for dynamic interactions between constituent-level and whole-word semantic representations in spoken language comprehension.
• DOI: 10.35534/lin.0802017 (registering DOI)
• Cite: Han, H. B., & Shang, T. Y. (2026). The Temporal Course of Semantic Access in Spoken Chinese Disyllabic Compound Comprehension. Advances in Linguistics Research, 8 (2), 205-217.