The Recognition of Chinese Compound Words by Native English- and Korean-speaking Learners of Chinese

Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner’s native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese coordinative compound words to various morphological structures to examine L1 effects and intra-word structure effects during compound word recognition and identified difficulty order associated with the different structures of Chinese compound words. Native English- and Korean-speaking learners of Chinese (n = 25, n = 13, respectively), along with native Chinese readers participated (n = 29). Both learners’ L1s and the morphological structures of compound words exerted significant main effects on compound word recognition. For non-native readers, the Korean group processed the five structures of compounds faster but less accurately than did the English-speaking counterpart. For both non-native groups, the subject-predicate structure was the most difficult to recognize, followed by the verb-complement structure.