ABSTRACT
Objective@#To investigate the cognitive processing characteristics of Chinese adjective-noun constructions.@*Methods@#Self-paced reading paradigm was adopted in the experiment, with sixty right-handed native speakers of Chinese (aged from 17 to 20 years old) as the participants/subjects. The sixty pairs of experimental materials were categorized into four conditions: high frequency plus concrete, high frequency plus abstract, low frequency plus concrete, and low frequency plus abstract construction.@*Results@#The construction with high frequency was significantly higher than the one with low frequency in terms of collocation judgement accuracy(high frequency plus concrete: (95.7±0.12)%, low frequency plus concrete: (49.2±0.45)%; high frequency plus abstract: (91.7±0.18)%, low frequency plus abstract: (44.0±0.42)%; Ffrequency=312.33, P<0.05), regardless of whether the head involved was abstract or concrete. Moreover, the judgement accuracy was higher when the construction was high frequency and its head was concrete than when the construction was low frequency and its head was abstract (P<0.05). The repeated ANOVA results showed that there were no striking differences in the participant's reaction time (RT) of the adjective(P>0.05), but the constructions with high frequency were processed more quickly and accurately than those with low frequency (high frequency plus concrete: (968.34±229.60) ms , low frequency plus concrete: (1 610.88 ±778.73)ms; high frequency plus abstract: (1 074.64±453.87)ms , low frequency plus abstract: (1 585.36±873.12)ms; Ffrequency=48.258, P<0.05) and the concreteness effect of head nouns was not significant in the meanwhile (Fabstract=1.814, P>0.05). The ANOVA on the RT of collocation correctness judgement revealed that the whole constructions with high frequency were responded more quickly than those with low frequency (high frequency plus concrete: (330.76±68.08) ms , low frequency plus concrete: (465.69 ±2 014.09)ms; high frequency plus abstract: (357.90±91.11)ms , low frequency plus abstract: (468.26±244.93)ms; Ffrequency=35.29, P<0.05). However, the concreteness effect of head noun was still not found on the processing of adjective-noun construction (Fabstract=0.424, P>0.05).@*Conclusion@#On the processing of the Chinese adjective-noun constructions out of context, the frequency effect of the entire construction is significant but the concreteness effect of head noun doesn't work in the current experiment.