Effect of Morpheme Meaning Dominance in Compound Word Recognition: Evidence from L2 Readers of Chinese
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authorsl The SD of the 20 L2 participants (mean age = 22.75) was 7.0, suggesting that many of the L2 participants were young and might still be developing their reading ability in the native language. This was not the case for the L1 control group, where the mean age of the participants was 20.83 and the SD was only 2.15. Therefore, it could not be excluded that the differences between the two groups were the results of the differences in the age ranges between the two groups.
l The authors state that “the first meaning coming to mind by at least 30% of the participants” and “at least 5 % more frequently than the second most reported meaning” were the criteria for the inclusion of the materials/characters used for the experiment. However, those numbers were arbitrary and the authors did not provide reasons or supports from the literature to indicate why those numbers were selected.
l The range for the dominant meanings in the stimuli assessment was noticeably larger than the range for the subordinate meaning. In fact, 32.4% might be too low for the meaning to be counted as “dominant”.
l As the authors used the linear mixed-effects modeling (LMM), factors such as word usage frequency, dominance of the meaning, the participants proficiency level should be included as the random/fixed effects. That is, the results of the LMM would inform as the relative contribution of the variables to the reaction times of the priming experiments.
l For an LMM analysis, the authors are expected to show if there was a main effect among the conditions. Post-hoc paired-wise comparisons should only be reported when there was a main effect. Additionally, Bonferroni correction should be used in order to protect the risk of Type I error. In the current study, the authors reported that the lexical decision times in the dominant condition were significantly shorter than the control condition; however, the p value was only .048. Was this p value the results of Bonferroni correction? If not, the p value must be greater than .05 after the Bonferroni correction was made.
l The authors state that “two participants were excluded from data analysis because of their lower accuracy (lower than 0.8).” However, why 80 % was selected as the thresholds should be explained. Take the reaction time study from Liu and Chen (2017) for instance. The authors cited several studies using different percentages as the cutoff point for the exclusion/inclusion of the results from a particular participant and justified that the 80% threshold used in that study was acceptable.
l Detailed information regarding the methods is expected to be provided. For instance, what was the equipment used in the experiment? What was the software used to run the experiment? How many practice items did the participants have before the formal experiment started?
Reference mentioned in the review:
Liu, C.-T. J., & Chen, L.-M. (2017). Processing conjunctive entailment of disjunction. Language and Linguistics, 18(2), 269-295.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis study investigated meaning ambiguities in L2 Chinese compound word processing, which was very interesting and also informative in terms of shicibushizi in L2 Chinese learning. The writing is very clear. My comments are mainly about methodological limitations. Hope they are helpful for improving this manuscript.
1. Participants: Does L1 Korean influence your findings since there might be cognate compound words between Korean and Chinese?
2. Items: How about other word properties not controlled in this study (e.g., semantic transparency, part of speech (e.g., noun, verb, adj., etc.)?
3. Although the authors explained that high frequency words were used for L2 investigation purposes, I am still puzzled by the L1 patterns. What fillers did you use? Please add them to the appendix. What is the implication for future research (e.g., using pseudowords)?
4. Minor edits are needed:
P. 1 Lines 35-36 I am not sure what you meant by "in reading research in the language learning context"
P. 7, Lines 311-312 "the orthographic complexity and word frequency criteria explained in the next paragraph" They were not explained in the next para but the one above Table 1.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsI thank the authors for carefully considering the comments I provided in the prious round of review.
