This paper addresses the issue of Chinese compound words from the perspective of lexical processing. We present new data, focusing on the relation between word and morphemes, the time course of Chinese lexical processing, and the effect of semantic transparency on word representation and processing. The discussions of the experimental results are set in the context of recent theoretical models of morphological processing which have been developed with reference to European languages.

Key words: morpheme, word, semantic transparency, time course of lexical processing