Concreteness and imageability and their influences on Chinese two-character word recognition

To compare the influences of concreteness and imageability on Chinese two-character (2C) word recognition, two experiments were conducted in a primed task on a cohort of skilled readers. In addition to PRIME (2C words or their transposed constituent characters) and DIRECTION (forward or backward collocations between prime words and targets), CONCRETENESS (prime words of high or low level of concreteness) and IMAGEABILITY (prime words of high or low imageability) were manipulated in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. The results consistently confirmed that 2C words can be perceived both as whole entities and according to their constituent characters, that high-concreteness/-imageability words are easier to recognize than low-concreteness/-imageability ones, and that bigger amounts facilitation are available when the prime and target form a forward than when they form a backward collocation. However, different patterns of interactions were revealed in participants’ performance between the variables in Experiments 1 and 2. It is concluded that concreteness is different from imageability to indicate the extent of semantic consistence between 2C words and their constituent characters. These two semantic features should be distinguished from each other in terms of their influences on 2C word recognition.