Concreteness Effects of Constituents in Naming Mandarin Compounds

The present study aims to use the concreteness effect to provide a detailed investigation of how Mandarin compounds are represented in the mental lexicon, that is, whether abstract and concrete morpheme constituents can influence the retrieval of Mandarin compounds during production. Our study investigated the question of the representation of Mandarin compound words through a picture naming task where forty-one participants were recruited. The behavioral outcomes indicated that there was a constituent concrete effect in Mandarin compounds due to the naming latencies for concrete compounds with two concrete constituents (cc condition) were much faster than concrete compounds with two abstract constituents (aa condition), which provided support for the decompositional model where constituents play important roles in the production of Mandarin compounds.