Semantic Transparency in Chinese Idiom Processing

語意透明度和中文成語認知歷程

10.29748/TJCSL.202112_(23).0004

劉德馨(Te-Hsin Liu)；張玳維(Tai-Wei Chang)

Chinese idiomatic expressions ； semantic transparency ； second language acquisition ； 中文成語 ； 語意透明度 ； 第二語言習得

臺灣華語教學研究

23期（2021 / 12 / 01）

97 - 121

英文

The aim of the present research is to make a preliminary analysis on the processing of Chinese quadrisyllabic idiomatic expressions (henceforth QIEs) by advanced learners of Mandarin Chinese. The novelty of the study is to demonstrate that semantic transparency plays an important role in the processing of Chinese idioms and can be used as a practical benchmark for Chinese idiom classification and teaching. An original set of 140 Chinese idioms collected from Chinese teaching materials of Taiwan were selected as the basis for constructing the linguistic stimuli. Sixty adult native Chinese speakers were asked to rate the semantic transparency of these QIEs. At a later stage, thirty native speakers of Indo-European languages, with an advanced grasp of Chinese, were recruited to participate in the experiment. Primed by QIEs divided into high semantic transparency and low semantic transparency, literal interpretations of the QIEs were visually presented to participants for a semantic judgment task. Our results demonstrated that learners achieved a higher accuracy rate with semantically transparent QIEs. In addition, semantically opaque QIEs elicited a significantly shorter reaction time than semantically transparent QIEs. These results are consistent with the predictions of the Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis (Gibbs et al. 1989), arguing that semantically transparent QIEs involve syntactic processing, but semantically opaque QIEs require holistic processing. Given that speakers comprehend an opaque QIE as a whole word, the processing of these idioms does not take longer. The results of this study showed evidence of psychologically relevant differences among Chinese idioms varying in the dimension of semantic transparency. The implications of these data for Chinese language teaching and for idiom comprehension were discussed.

本研究針對中文四字格的理解歷程進行初步研究，對象為高級華語學習者。藉著分析語意透明度如何影響成語的認知歷程，本研究認為可將其作為難度分類的參考指標。為達成此一目的，本文先從臺灣華語教材挑選出140筆四字格成語，再收集60位母語人士的語意透明度評比。30位高級程度、印歐語系國家的高級程度華語學習者參與了本實驗。本文將40筆高頻成語分成高語意透明度和低語意透明度，並提供正確或錯誤的成語解釋供受試者進行語義判斷實驗。行為實驗結果顯示，語意透明度越高，學習者的答題正確率越高。此外，語意透明度越低的成語，反應時間反而越快。這個結果呼應了成語分解性假說（Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis, Gibbs et al. 1989），因為根據此假說，高語意透明度的成語理解歷程於語法層次進行，而低語意透明度的成語，則以單字的方式被記憶和理解。本文的研究結果證實了中文四字格語意透明度的差異對學習者認知歷程的影響，文末將針對華語教學和成語理解進行討論。

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