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Human Cognitive Constraints on the Separation Frequency and Limit of Separable Words

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13250))

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Abstract

Based on the CCL corpus, the paper employs Java to statistically analyze the Chinese characters and words inserted between the AB morphemes of the separable words. The conclusion is as follows: (1) In terms of average value, considering frequency, the top five average values of inserted Chinese characters and words are about 4 ± 2, and regardless of frequency, the top five average values of inserted Chinese characters and words are about 8 ± 3; (2) In terms of frequency distribution, about 2 ± 1 Chinese characters or words can be inserted, and the maximum capacity of Chinese characters and words can be inserted is about 7 ± 2. The separated form of separable words can be regarded as gestalt, closely related to human working memory and information processing ability. It has psychological reality: the limit of human processing information is about ‘seven’, and about ‘four’ is the sensitive point of information easier to process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wang [8] has proposed a formula to calculate the separation frequency: the separation frequency of separable word (F) = the number of separated examples/the total number of valid examples. The number of separated examples is the number of examples containing the separated form of the separable words that we obtained from the corpus. The total number of valid examples is the sum of the number of valid examples in which the separable word and its separated form occur. The separation frequency discussed in this paper differs from this in that it refers to the frequency of the components that can be inserted between the two morphemes AB of the separable word. We, therefore, term the former as separation rate and the latter as separation frequency.

  2. 2.

    The separation limit is the maximum allowed insertion of components between the two morphemes AB of separable words.

  3. 3.

    ‘个(gè)’ is a measure word in Chinese, which is in brackets, same as below.

  4. 4.

    i.e., verb-object compounds.

  5. 5.

    ‘A$20B’ refers to the insertion of 20 Chinese characters between the two morphemes A and B of separable words. The number of 20 Chinese characters was chosen as the retrieval number in consideration of the fact that it should be as exhaustive as possible, so a larger value was chosen for the retrieval process. This avoids excluding some separated forms with a large number of inserted Chinese characters.

  6. 6.

    This step speeds up the filtering of irrelevant usages, but it also brings some uncertainty, with parts of the corpus requiring secondary confirmation in the original corpus. Thanks to Dr. Wang of Beihang University for his help.

  7. 7.

    The frequency is primarily the proportion of the various occurrences of a Chinese character or word’s separated insertion to all circumstances.

  8. 8.

    ‘NIC’ means Number of Inserted Characters, ‘FO’ means Frequency of Occurrence, ‘sw’ means separable word.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chinese as a Second Language, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Xiaoming Han & Haifeng Wang

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  1. Xiaoming Han
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  2. Haifeng Wang
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Correspondence to Xiaoming Han or Haifeng Wang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Yanhui Gu

  3. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

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Han, X., Wang, H. (2022). Human Cognitive Constraints on the Separation Frequency and Limit of Separable Words. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13250. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_2

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