Frequency effects in the processing of Chinese inflection

Chinese inflection differs from that of European languages in that it is fully parsable in the orthography, which raises the possibility that Chinese inflected forms may not show the surface frequency effects found in other languages. Five lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine this issue. They showed that surface frequency did indeed affect reaction times, independent of base frequency and acceptability of the inflected forms, but only if the design of the materials encouraged readers to process base–affix combinations. This suggests that surface frequency effects emerge at a late stage when components are combined into complex words, not during initial contact with the lexicon.