Chinese compound word production in typing-to-dictation

Abstract

Chinese morphemes typically correspond to one character and one syllable. This one-to-one alignment makes Chinese a critical contrast to languages with more complex morpho-phonological structures for investigating the universality of morpheme activation in compound production. This study measures interkeystroke intervals (IKIs), the latencies between consecutive keystrokes, in Pinyin typing (Romanization input method), to clarify the timing of compound production. Gallant et al. (2026) found longer IKIs at character boundaries when participants typed Pinyin to transcribe visually presented two-character Chinese words. The present study used the same stimuli in the auditory modality, ensuring that characters were neither seen nor produced. We replicated the character-boundary IKI lengthening and the interaction between initial-character frequency and morphological type, demonstrating that the effects in Gallant et al. (2026) cannot be attributed solely to visual segmentation cues and providing converging evidence that characters function as cross-modal planning units in Pinyin typing. Crucially, we report a new pattern in which IKIs at character boundaries are shorter in compounds than in monomorphemic words, suggesting that morpheme activation can modulate motor execution even in a language where morphemes and syllables overlap closely. These findings further support Pinyin typing as a sensitive paradigm for investigating Chinese compound production.