Exhaustive semantic activation for reading ambiguous verbs in Chinese sentences

Lingua Sinica

Table 3 Stimulus characteristics of the auditory primes

	Prime groups
	Low-ROM verbs	High-ROM verbs	Unambiguous verbs
Word frequency	603.56	729.75	477.88
Syllable length	1.00	1.00	1.00
Homophone dominance (%)	61.79	64.29	60.51
Number of meanings	4.69	4.56	1.00
Number of syntactic categories	1.88	1.69	1.44
Percent of verb usage	98.91	98.38	97.03
Number of arguments	2.13	2.06	2.06
Relatedness of Meaning (1–7)	2.47	5.08	n/a
Familiarity rating (1–7)	6.83	6.8	n/a
Percent of primary meaning	82.38	79.75	n/a
Percent of secondary meaning	56.56	60.69	n/a

Note. Homophone dominance = frequency of the stimulus relative to the overall syllable frequency calculated based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese 4.0 (Chen et al. 1996); number of syntactic categories = number of different syntactic categories associated with the stimuli based on Chinese Wordnet (Huang et al. 2010) and Ministry of Education Revised Chinese Dictionary (1994); percent of verb usage = relative frequency of the prime word used as a verb in Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese 4.0; number of arguments = number of obligatory arguments for the primary meaning of each verb; percent of primary meaning = percentage of participants that rated the primary meaning as the primary meaning; percent of secondary meaning = percentage of participants that rated the secondary meaning as the secondary meaning