Although Vietnamese has a long history of linguistic research, as yet no psycholinguistic studies addressing lexical processing in this language have been carried out.
This paper is the first to investigate lexical processing in Vietnamese, and this addresses the reading of Vietnamese bi-syllabic compound words.
A large single-subject experiment with 20,000 words was complemented by a smaller multiple-subject experiment with 550 words.
We report the novel finding of an inhibitory, anti-frequency effect of Vietnamese compounds’ constituents.
We show that this anti-frequency effect is predicted by a computational model of lexical processing grounded in naive discrimination learning.
We also show that predictors derived from this model provide a much better fit to the observed reaction times than traditional lexical-distributional predictors. Effects of the density of the compound graph, previously observed for English, were replicated for Vietnamese.
Furthermore, tone diacritics were found to be important predictors of silent reading, providing further evidence for the role of phonology in reading.
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