Double dissociation of grammatical form classes in nouns and verbs is quite familiar in the field of aphasia and many approaches proposed explain this particular kind of selective impairment between different types of brain damaged patients. However, cross-linguistic research in different languages with distinct characteristics challenges directly to the English-based accounts, especially in the studies of Chinese. In this paper, not only the whole-word level in nouns and verbs is demonstrated to have
different processing loads as universals, but also the syntactic roles of constituted morphemes within a lexical item, namely, sublexical units, can influence the identification of nouns and verbs in the normal. That is, it will cost processing difficulty while the composed morphemes are far away from the typicality of a noun or a verb; in contrast, it will benefit the recognition of words if the constructed components are closer to the prototypical noun/verb-like concepts in our mental lexicon.
Therefore, we conclude that the subtle awareness in sublexical processing is an important factor to complete word recognition in Chinese. In addition, in this paper, there is also an issue raised to be discussed in depth. It is concerned about the aging problem of the categorization in adjectives, which are classified to have much tied relationship with verbs traditionally, having a reverse profile proformed in this study. That is, adjectives are more like nouns as results reflected.