Affiliations: Department of Psychology, University of
Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy | Otorhinolaryngology Department, Taichung Veterans
General Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan | Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of
Hong-Kong, Hong-Kong, China
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Davide Crepaldi, MoMo Lab,
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, piazza dell'Ateneo
Nuovo 1, 20126 Milano, Italy. Tel.: +39 02 64483736; Fax: +39 02 64483706;
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract: Lexical-semantic variables (such as word frequency, imageability and
age of acquisition) have been studied extensively in neuropsychology to address
the structure of the word production system. The evidence available on this
issue is still rather controversial, mainly because of the very complex
interrelations between lexical-semantic variables. Moreover, it is not clear
whether the results obtained in Indo-European languages also hold in languages
with a completely different structure and script, such as Chinese. The
objective of the present study is to investigate this specific issue by
studying the effect of word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, visual
complexity of the stimuli, grammatical class and morphological structure in
word and picture naming in Chinese. The effect of these variables on naming and
reading accuracy of healthy and brain-damaged individuals is evaluated using
mixed-effect models, a statistical technique that allows to model both fixed
and random effects; this feature substantially enhances the statistical power
of the technique, so that several variables – and their complex
interrelations – can be handled effectively in a unique analysis. We
found that grammatical class interacts consistently across tasks with
morphological structure: all participants, both healthy and brain-damaged,
found simple nouns significantly easier to read and name than complex nouns,
whereas simple and complex verbs were of comparable difficulty. We also found
that imageability was a strong predictor in picture naming, but not in word
naming, whereas the contrary held true for age of acquisition. These results
are taken to indicate the existence of a morphological level of processing in
the Chinese word production system, and that reading aloud may occur along a
non-semantic route (either lexical or sub-lexical) in this language.
Keywords: Chinese, aphasia, word naming, picture naming, imageability, age of acquisition, mixed-effect model, verbs, nouns
