ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of research on Chinese psycholinguistics by focusing on the cognitive processes that underlie several key properties of Chinese. The typological properties featured in this overview include the processing of logographic orthography, the saliency of syllables as a processing unit, the processing of tonal phonology, the resolution of homophony and lexical ambiguity, the comprehension of head-final structures in Chinese noun phrases and the role of discourse context in the interpretation of referring expressions. This review shows how Chinese offers psycholinguists an array of typologically intriguing phenomena, which may shed light on the relation between human language processing and linguistic typology.
