{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,28]],"date-time":"2026-07-28T19:32:28Z","timestamp":1785267148611,"version":"3.55.0"},"reference-count":57,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"11","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,27]],"date-time":"2025-10-27T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1761523200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100012456","name":"National Social Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["21AZD139"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["21AZD139"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100012456","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Behavioral Sciences"],"abstract":"<jats:p>It is theoretically accepted that Chinese two-character words (2C-words) are processed both holistically and according to their constituent characters. Given the evidence on readers\u2019 sensitivities to the syntactic relationships between the constituent characters, however, this general view might not fully explain the 2C-word processing mechanism. As an important category of 2C-words, verb\u2013object constructions (VOCs) exhibit significant heterogeneity in splittability, the degree of syntactic phrasalization through the insertion of other characters between the constituent characters. To examine skilled readers\u2019 VOC processing under the influences of splittability and whether the constituent characters are bound or free characters (character type), two experiments were conducted on a cohort of college students, who were Chinese native speakers, using the lexical decision task in a repetition priming paradigm. The prime stimuli (primer type) comprised three conditions: (a) the targets themselves, (b) the targets\u2019 transposed non-words, and (c) non-linguistic baseline symbols \u2018\u203b\u203b\u2019. The primers\u2019 two constituents were presented simultaneously and sequentially in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. A significant interaction was revealed across both experiments between splittability and character type in the participants\u2019 performance. The main effect was significant for primer type in the participants\u2019 performance in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2, however, the interaction was significant both between primer type and splittability in the participants\u2019 performance and between primer type and character type in their reaction times. In addition to confirming the general view, skilled readers might inevitably experience syntactic and semantic combinations of the constituent characters in their processing of VOCs.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/bs15111460","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,28]],"date-time":"2025-10-28T09:16:07Z","timestamp":1761642967000},"page":"1460","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Influences of Splittability and Character Type on Processing of Chinese Two-Character Verb\u2013Object Constructions"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"15","author":[{"given":"Xiaoxin","family":"Chen","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Chinese Language and Literature, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, China"},{"name":"School of Foreign Studies, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao 266580, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9511-3109","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Degao","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Chinese Language and Literature, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Wenling","family":"Ma","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Foreign Languages, Liaocheng University, Liaocheng 252000, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Meixue","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Foreign Studies, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao 266580, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jin","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Chinese Language and Literature, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,27]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"463","DOI":"10.1037\/a0016261","article-title":"Integrating experiential and distributional data to learn semantic representations","volume":"116","author":"Andrews","year":"2009","journal-title":"Psychological Review"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.18637\/jss.v067.i01","article-title":"Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4","volume":"67","author":"Bates","year":"2015","journal-title":"Journal of Statistical Software"},{"key":"ref_3","first-page":"29","article-title":"Effects of the transposed morpheme on the Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from eye movement data","volume":"3","author":"Bian","year":"2010","journal-title":"Psychological Research"},{"key":"ref_4","first-page":"387","article-title":"The influence of concreteness of words on word recognition","volume":"30","author":"Chen","year":"1998","journal-title":"Acta Psychologica Sinica"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"34","DOI":"10.1016\/j.cortex.2015.06.002","article-title":"Processing emotional words in two languages with one brain: ERP and fMRI evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals","volume":"71","author":"Chen","year":"2015","journal-title":"Cortex"},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"China Ministry of Education (2022). 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