Reading monomorphemic and compound words in Chinese Lei Cui 1 , Tuomo Häikiö 2 , Wenxin Zhang 1 , Yuwei Zheng 3 and Jukka Hyönä 2, 4 1 Shandong Normal University, China / 2 University of Turku, Finland / 3 Jinan University, China / 4 Tomsk State University, Russia Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to study the recognition of two-character Chinese monomorphemic and compound words by adult native Chinese readers. In Experiment 1, the words appeared non-spaced, whereas in Experiment 2 a space was inserted between the two characters. An interaction between word type and spacing refects a trend for spacing to slow down the rec- ognition of monomorphemic words and speed up that of compound words. Te word frequency efect was steeper for monomorphemic than compound words. Te number of strokes in the frst and the second character infuenced the rec- ognition time for compound words, but not for monomorphemic words. Te results are interpreted in the light of the parallel dual route model of morpho- logical processing. Te holistic route is more prevalent in recognizing Chinese monomorphemic, while the morphological decomposition route is more preva- lent in processing Chinese compound words. Keywords: Chinese, word recognition, morphological processing, spacing Introduction In the present study, we investigated whether morphological complexity plays a signifcant role in visual word recognition in Chinese. We did this by examining whether reading morphologically complex compound words takes more efort in Chinese than reading morphologically simple words. Chinese has a logographic script, where written text is formed from strings of equally spaced, box-like symbols called characters. A character can be a free morpheme (i.e., a word by itself), but characters are frequently combined with other characters to form multi-character words. Compounding is highly common; in fact, the majority of words in Chinese Te Mental Lexicon 12:1 (2017), 1–20. doi 10.1075/ml.12.1.01cui issn 1871-1340 / e-issn 1871-1375 © John Benjamins Publishing Company