Abstract: Three experiments were performed to examine concreteness effects of two- character Chinese words and test Contrasting predictions of a dual - representation and a context availability hopothesis for concreteness effects. In experiment 1 , equivalent lexical decision times were obtained for concrete and abstract words when they were frequent words , whereas longer lexical decision times were ob- tained for abstract words than for concrete words when they were rare words. The se- cond experiment was to repeat the priming experiment of rare words. Results indi- cated that concreteness effects still existed. The third experiment was perforrned to ex- amine coacreteness effects with two kinds of seotence contexts. With a neutral context lexical decision times for abstract words were longer than for concrete words. With a congruous context , however , the lexical decision times fbr these two word types were equivalent. These results didn, t completely support dual - representation theory or con text availabilitv model .

Key words: concreteness effects, frcquency, repeat priming, sentence context