Chapter 3 Methodology
3.2 Materials
The materials were sentences embedded with VO-structured verbs with two factors
being manipulated: transparency (Transparent, In between and Opaque) and sentence
pattern (Separated, Unseparated). They could be divided into six conditions: OS (opaque,
separated), OU (opaque, unseparated), IS (in between, separated), IU (in between,
unseparated), TS (transparent, separated), TU (transparent, unseparated). The example
sentences are provided in Table 1.
Table 1: Example sentences of the current experiment (TS, transparent, separated; TU, transparent, unseparated; IS, in between, separated; IU, in between, unseparated; OS, opaque, separated; OU, opaque, unseparated).
Conditions Transparency Sentence structure Example sentence
OS Opaque Separated
司 機 熬 了 夜 si ji ao le ye
‘The driver stayed up late’
OU Opaque Unseparated
司 機 熬 夜 了 si ji ao ye le
‘The driver stayed up late’
IS In between Separated
胖 子 跑 了 步 pan zi pao le bu
‘The fat guy ran’
IU In between Unseparated
胖 子 跑 步 了 pan zi pao bu le
‘The fat guy ran’
TS Transparent Separated
助 理 犯 了 錯 zhu li fan le cu
‘The assistant made a mistake’
TU Transparent Unseparated
助 理 犯 錯 了 zhu li fan cu le
‘The assistant made a mistake’
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For the separated conditions (OS, IS and TS), the VO sequence was interposed with a
fixed morpheme le 了 for the following two reasons: (1) it was reported that in the case of
inserting frequently used aspectual morpheme like –le 了, -zhe 著, and –guo 過, the VO
sequence should be viewed as words (Siewierska et al., 2010); (2) –le 了 was reported to be
the most frequently used interposing element for the VO sequence (Smith, 1999; Wang,
2009). As results, all the experimental stimuli had the following sentence structures:
{[Subject]N.+[V le O] Com./Phr.}Sen. or
{[Subject] N.+[VO le] Com./Phr.}Sen.
Note: “N” means Noun, “Com.” means Compound, “Phr.” means Phrase and
“Sen.” means Sentence.
First, Verb-Object structured verbs were selected for the experiment. It should be noted
beforehand that in order to observe lexicalization of the VO sequence, the final division of
semantic transparency into three conditions (Opaque/In between/Transparent) was made by
the result of a pilot test done by native speakers of Chinese Mandarin. Therefore, the
classification of three groups in terms of semantic transparency before the pilot test was only
temporary.
The materials in the Opaque group and the In between group were mainly from the
following references: Smith’s dissertation (1999) , Wang’s (2009) and Zhang’s (2013)
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master theses. The materials in Smith’s and Zhang’s were from the corpus of Academia
Sinica, with the tags related to the VO sequence, [spv.] and [spo.]1. As for the materials in
the Transparent group, PRACTICAL AUDIO-VISUAL CHINESE (新版視聽華語) and the
Sinica Corpus were the main resources.
A total of 623 critical verbs were selected. They were further eliminated with the
following steps. The first step was to control the word frequency, which was done by
looking up the log frequency with the Chinese Word Sketch Engine
(http://wordsketch.ling.sinica.edu.tw/). There were at least a billion Chinese lexical items in
the corpus of gigaword2all, which was constructed by the Institute of Linguistics, Academia
Sinica. Verbs with no frequency recorded were filtered out. The rest of the materials (577
verbs in total) were then classified roughly by its grammatical tag in the corpus. In the
Opaque group (226 verbs) and the In between group (152 verbs), the verbs were mainly
from the literatures mentioned above. The grammatical tags for these two groups of verbs
were all intransitive verbs, usually tagged as VA, VB and VH2. As for the Transparent group
(199 verbs), since this group was composed of transparent VO sequence, most of the verbs
in this group were tagged as VC+Na, with VC referring to a transitive verb and Na referring
1 [spv] and [spo] are two features designed by the Acdemia Sinica Corpus.
[spv] means the Verb while [spo] means the Noun of a separable V N compound e.g. 吃 Vc[+spv]了他的虧 Na[+spo].
2 [VA] Intransitive Action Verb 動作不及物動詞.
[VB] Intransitive-like Action Verb 動作類及物動詞.
[VH] Intransitive Stative Verb 狀態不及物動詞.
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to a noun. (e.g. 寫[VC]詩[Na] “write a poem”).
To finalize the classification of the selected verbs into the Opaque, In between and
Transparent conditions, a pilot test on semantic transparency was conducted. The verbs from
the temporary classified three groups were equally distributed into four questionnaires for
subjects to rate. Three questionnaires contained 144 verbs and one contained 145 verbs, and
each of them was rated by 30 Chinese-speaking subjects ranging from 20 to 40 years old (See
Appendix A for the details of the semantic transparency questionnaire). The subjects were
asked to judge how different a verb’s meaning in use is from the meaning combination of its
constituents on a 5-point scale
(1: least different, 5: very different). Taking chi cu 吃醋“being jealous ” as an example, since
chi means “eat” and cu means “vinegar”, the combination of chi cu is “eating vinegar”, which
is very different from its meaning in use “being jealous”. Subject may consequently rate this
verb 5 (very different). Based on the subjects’ ratings, the mean scores for the verbs in these
three groups were: Opaque group =3.65 (SD=.45); In between group =2.40 (SD=.25);
Transparent group =1.53 (SD=.14). Statistical analysis on the results showed that there was a
significant difference among these three groups, F (2, 58) = 297.02, p<.001.
After these three groups (Opaque/In between/Transparent) were formed, other
variables that might confound the experiment were further controlled. First of all, word
frequency (obtained from the corpus of gigaword2all in Chinese Word Sketch Engine
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mentioned above) of all the VO structured verbs in the three groups were equivalent no
matter in VO unseparated form, F(2, 58) = 1.65, p=.200 or in VO separated form F(2, 58) =
2.67, p=.078. Moreover, two other pilot tests were conducted to ensure that the degree of
concreteness and familiarity were equal among the three groups of verbs (See Appendices B
and C for the details of the familiarity questionnaire and concreteness questionnaire).
Another two groups of 30 subjects (20-40 years old, native speakers of Chinese Mandarin)
were recruited to judge the concreteness and familiarity of the verbs on a 5-point scale (1:
least concrete, 5: very concrete; 1: least familiar, 5: very familiar). These two groups of
subjects did not participate in the previous transparency pilot test and the later formal
experiment. The results of these two pilot tests showed that there were no significant
difference among these three groups of stimuli in terms of concreteness, F(2, 58) = 2.21,
p=.118, and familiarity degree, F(2, 58) = 1.08, p=.346. Finally, the neighborhood size of
the verbs in these three groups was controlled. The value of neighborhood size was
computed automatically by adopting python-based Load and Analysis Chinese
Corpus-Natural Language Toolkit (LACC-NLTK) based on Academia Sinica Balanced
Corpus with tagged texts (http://tm.itc.ntnu.edu.tw/CNLP/?q=node/6). There was no
significant difference among the three groups, F (2, 58) = 1.43, p=.247.
As soon as the critical VO constructed verbs were finalized, the construction of sentences
stimuli was started. All the sentences, including fillers, were built with five characters. In
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those critical sentences, the subject of a sentence was always a two-character animate noun.
Since all the sentences should be natural enough for the experiment, the subject of a sentence
stimulus was chosen to be correlated to its critical verb, e.g. 胖子+跑步了 “The fat guy + ran.” The correlation between the subjects and the verbs of the three groups of sentence
stimuli were checked. The statistic results showed that there was no significant difference
among the three groups of sentence stimuli in terms of correlation, F(2, 58) = 1.48, p=.236.
Furthermore, the number of the strokes of the verbs (F(2, 58) = .42, p=.657) was statistically
equivalent across three groups of sentences. Finally, a final pilot test (See Appendix D for the
details of the sentence naturalness questionnaire) was conducted to ask a new group of 30
subjects (20-40 years old, native speakers of Chinese Mandarin) to rate the naturalness of the
sentences on a 5-point scale (1: least natural, 5: very natural). Ideally, all the sentence stimuli
should be rated equally nature across all the conditions, but VO unseparated sentences got
statistically higher score compared with VO separated sentences. However, this was not
surprising since previous literature had pointed out that the VO unseparated form is the main
usage of VOCs (Yi,2007). Though the statistic result showed that there was a main effect of
sentence naturalness between VO separated sentences and VO unseparated sentences (F(1, 29)
= 54.75, p<.001), and a significant separablility x transparency interaction, F(2, 58) = 4.58,
p=.014, with unseparated condition having higher ratings than separated condition , all the
sentences could still be counted as natural since the mean score of all the sentences were
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higher than 4.37 out of 5 (TS = 4.53, TU =4.65 , IS =4.48 , IU =4.76 , OS =4.37 , OU =4.75). The results of the pilot tests are summarized in table 2.
Table 2. The summary of the statistical results for all the controlled variables.
Ratings/values Factors F Value p
VO verbs
Semantic transparency
Semantic transparency (3 levels)
F (2, 58) = 297.02 .000**
Sentence naturalness Separability (2 levels), Semantic transparency (3 levels)
Separability
F (2, 58) = 54.75 .000**
Semantic transparency
F (2, 58) = .76 1 Separability x Semantic
transparency F (2, 58) = 4.57
.014*
Sentence naturalness in VO unseparated form Semantic transparency (3 levels) F (2, 58) = 2.12 1 Sentence naturalness in VO separated form Semantic transparency (3 levels) F (2, 58) = 2.74 .072
Correlation between subjects and verbs Semantic transparency (3 levels) F (2, 58) = 1.48 1 Note. p*=<.05, p**=<.001
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There were 30 sentence stimuli for each condition, with a total of 180 critical sentences
included in the experiment. Ninety fillers were also added, including23 ungrammatical VO
separated sentences (e.g. 粽子違著規 zong zi wei zhe gui ‘The rice dumpling is breaking rules’), 23 ungrammatical VO unseparated sentences (麵粉摸彩著 mian fen mo cai zhe ‘The
flour is drawing lots’) and 44 non-VO grammatical sentences (蚊子很討厭 wen zi hen tao
yan ‘Mosquitos are hateful’). Since a participant could not read the same VO verb in both
separated sentence and unseparated sentence, two lists were set up to avoid stimuli
repetition. Each list then contained 90 critical sentences and 90 fillers (180 sentences in
total) without any repetition on both the verb part and the noun part of a VO constructed
verb. In addition to the verbs, all the subjects of the sentences were not repeated on the
lexical level. The exact sentence numbers in each experimental condition are provided in
Table 3. (See Appendix E for a complete list of critical verbs and Appendix F for a
complete list of sentence stimuli)
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Table 3: The number of the experimental trials in each condition.
List Conditions Trial no.
Example
sentence List Conditions Trial no.
The experiment was carried out in a sound attenuated room. Participants were seated in
a comfortable chair in front of a computer screen used for presenting stimuli. All the stimuli
were presented with the E-Prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools, Inc.). When the
experiment started, the participants were asked to press space bar as soon as they saw the