Using Kohonen Maps of Chinese Morphological Families to Visualize the Interplay of Morphology and Semantics in Chinese

A morphological family in Chinese is the set of compound words embedding a common morpheme, and Self-organizing maps (SOM) of these Chinese morphological families can be built. Computation of the unified-distance matrices for the SOMs allows us to perform semantic clustering of the members of the morphological families. Such semantic clustering sheds light on the interplay between morphology and semantics in Chinese. We studied how the word lists used in a lexical decision task (LDT) (Chen, Galmar, & Su, 2009) are mapped onto the clusters of the SOMs. We showed that this mapping is helpful to predict whether repetitive processing of members of a morphological family would elicit a satiation in an LDT - habituation - of both morphological and semantic units of the shared morpheme. In their LDT experiment, Chen, Galmar, and Su (2009) found evidence for morphological satiation but not for semantic satiation. Conclusions drawn from our computational experiments and calculations are in accordance with the behavioral experimental results in Chen et al. (2009). Finally, we showed that our work could be helpful to linguists in preparing adequate word lists for behavioral study of Chinese morphological families.