Abstract: Given that there are no visual spaces between words in written Chinese and characters are the basic perceptual unit, it is intriguing how Chinese readers segment and represent words. Many studies have indicated that words play an important role in Chinese reading (Yan et al., 2006; Li et al., 2005; Rayner et al., 2007; Bai et al., 2008; Yan et al., 2009), while some other research has demonstrated that characters are more important than words in reading (Chen et al., 2003). However, some researchers have found that native Chinese readers have no clear concept of words, and they often disagree on how to divide the continuous string of characters within a sentence into words (Hoosain, 1992; Tsai et al., 1998; Miller et al., 2007). So there is a discrepancy here: If words play an important role in Chinese reading, what are the characteristics of these words? We propose that Chinese readers segment text into words according to complex cognitive representations: “subjective words” (e.g., representing the phrase “economic development” as a single word). Three studies were conducted to explore 1) whether subjective words are psychologically real in readers’ minds and 2) how these subjective words are processed. The first study examined how well the readers could recognize the two-character combination as a word or a phrase. The results showed that the readers tend to judge phrases as subjective words. which indicated that they represented words according to their own complex cognition about words, which demonstrated that subjective words were real in readers’ minds. The second and third experiment investigated the characteristics of subjective word processing. The second experiment explored whether subjective words had a “word superiority effect” — whether the readers found the position of a character in subjective words more efficiently than in non-words. The third experiment examined whether the reaction time of classifying subjective words as words was shorter than nonwords by using a lexical decision task. The results showed that there was no significant difference between words and subjective words in reaction time and accuracy. The accuracy rate of searching for the position of a character in subjective words was higher than in nonwords in the second experiment. In the third experiment, we didn’t find any significant difference between subjective words and nonwords in accuracy rate. To sum up, the present study indicated that native Chinese readers don’t judge a two-character combination as a word or a phrase accurately, and that they often confused them. It also demonstrated that subjective words are psychologically real in readers’ minds, which shows that the readers represented subjective words, and that some subjective words violated the Chinese grammar rules. The second experiment found that the word superiority effect in subjective words is the same as in the words compared with nonwords under compulsive choice task. The third experiment indicated that subjective words are processed more efficiently than nonwords. Subjective words are more likely to be processed as a whole.

Key words: subjective word, word, phrase, superiority effect