中文基本詞彙:計算語言學及心理語言學初探

Basic-Level Words in Chinese: A Computational and Psycholinguistic Investigation

劉貫立(Guan-Li Liu)

指導教授 ： 麥傑 ； 吳俊雄

國立中正大學/文學院/語言學研究所/碩士(2016年)

摘要

無資料

關鍵字

心理詞彙 ； 中文 ； 基本詞彙 ； 上位詞 ； 下位詞

並列摘要

Although basic-level words play an important role in language processing, surprisingly few direct empirical studies tell us what are the basic-level words in Chinese, and their superordinate-level words or subordinate-level words of these words. For this reason, this study investigates the Chinese basic-level words, and the superordinate-level words as well as subordinate-level words of these basic-level vocabulary in adults’ mental lexicons. As Rosch et al. (1976) argues, the basic-level words are more general and concrete. Based on this definition, more studies tried to investigate the basic levels in varied aspects, such as morphology. However, there are few empirical studies of basic levels, and most of them focused on English words. The basic-level words in Chinese are supposed to be a little different from the words in English for the following three reasons: First, the common basic-level words may vary in distinct languages. For example, LAMP is a common basic-level word in Rosch et al. (1976), but this may be changed in Chinese. Second, the similar problems are raised when we think of the subordinate-level vocabulary of these basic-level words. For example, SUGAR MAPLE is unfamiliar to us. Last, lots of subordinate levels in Chinese are compound words which include the basic-level words as their components as Tai (2007) claims. Moreover, Jiang (2000) provides Chinese basic-level words and the superordinates as well as subordinates in Chinese, but she focuses on children’ mental lexicons.

Both computational linguistic and psycholinguistic methods are adopted in this study. In computational linguistic part, the computational method is used to compute the word frequencies in version 4.0 of Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese which contains ten millions words and varied genres. This source provides a more convincing list of high-frequency words. With the word frequencies, the common superordinate-level categories of the high-frequency words (e.g. MUSICAL INSTRUMENT) are found and used in further experiments. In Experiment 1 and 2, questionnaires are distributed to the participants for obtaining the basic-level words and subordinate-level words respectively. Participants needed to write down several first-come-into-mind objects for each superordinate-level category in Experiment 1. The typical members in superordinate-level categories and the basic-level words were affirmed in Experiment 1. After this, these basic-level words were provided as stimuli in Experiment 2, and the subordinate-level words were affirmed in the results. Chinese words in three different levels were provided in Experiment 3 for feature listing. With these three experiments, the wordlist of Chinese words in three different levels were affirmed. Moreover, several points are raised in this study. First, the basic-level words do not necessarily have higher word frequencies than words in other levels. Second, the compound subordinate-level words not only affect people in processing, but also the conceptual knowledge of subordinate-level words. The hierarchical structures of words are adopted in several tasks in other languages, such as recall tasks. Therefore, the results are available to facilitate other related researches in Chinese now. Due to the special representation of subordinate-level words in Chinese, the results of tasks will be more interesting than other languages.

並列關鍵字

mental lexicon ； Mandarin Chinese ； basic level ； superordinate level ； subordinate level

參考文獻

Lin, H.-M. (2006). Hypernyms and Hyponyms in Discourse (Unpublished master’s thesis). National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan.

Chen, K.-J., C.-R. Huang, L.-P. Chang, and H.-L. Hsu (1996). Sinica Corpus: Design Methodology for Balanced Corpora. Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 11), 167-176.

Tai, H-Y. (1994). Chinese Classifier Systems and Human Categorization. In honor of William S.-Y. Wang: Interdisciplinary Studies on Language and Language Change, 479-494.

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Battig, W. F., and W. E. Montague (1969). Category Norms of Verbal Items in 56 Categories: A Replication and Extension of the Connecticut Category Norms. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80(3), 1-46.