Psycholinguistic Norms for 3,783 Two-Character Words in Simplified Chinese

Abstract

Over 70% of the more than 56,000 most frequently used words in simplified Chinese are two-character words (2C-words). The present study collected data on subtitle frequency, number of strokes, number of meanings, familiarity, concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, subjective frequency, subjective number of meanings (sNOMs), compositionality, emotional experience rating, sensory experience rating (SER), and semantic transparency (ST) for 3,783 commonly used 2C-words. Correlative patterns were identified between the 13 variables, all of which, with the exception of imageability, SER, and sNOM, were significantly predictive of the changes in participants’ RTs in LDs on the target words. In conclusion, skilled readers’ awareness of 2C-words’ features such as concreteness, imageability, compositionality, sNOM, and ST is closely associated with their semantic perception of the constituent characters.