Issues involving the relationship between Chinese words and the lexicon are addressed in this chapter. Some of the questions we will consider are: What is ‘the lexicon’? What is and what is not ‘listed’ there in Chinese? Are words ‘stored’ in and ‘accessed’ from the lexicon as gestalt wholes or by their component morphemes? What role does character orthography play in accessing the Chinese lexicon?

A first common source of confusion in thinking about Chinese words and the lexicon is that Chinese words are for the most part composed out of open-class items that are bound. This starkly contrasts with other languages in which bound morphemes are usually closed class, functional elements (i.e., affixes of some sort). Therefore, the discussion of composed and decomposed lexical storage in those languages (e.g., English) tends to centre on whether word roots and their affixes are stored in precompiled or decomposed fashion. This makes the question of composed or decomposed storage in the case of Chinese somewhat different, but very interesting and important.

A second common source of confusion is the relationship between the Chinese natural speech lexicon and the processing of Chinese character orthography. This is confusing because the Chinese character orthographic system in a very real sense drives the concept of lexical processing for many investigators who have worked on Chinese language processing. Below we will consider these two issues separately, and try to determine what role Chinese characters play in Chinese natural language processing.