Study On Language Transfer Effect Of English And Chinese Lexical Similarity

Language transfer is originally an important concept that in Learning Psychology.Behaviorist psychologists define it as “automatic, uncontrolled, subconscious use ofpast that learned behaviors in the attempt to produce new responses”. Cognitivepsychologists treat it as “strategy” or as“cross-linguistic influence”. And in thepresent research,this concept is understood from the cognitive perspective.Up tonow,researches that on lexical transfer abroad have attained well-developedachievements. However, the researches are not carried out pervasively in our country.Most of them are still remain at the level of grammar. Therefore, bilingualvocabulary research is also a very weak sub-field of second language acquisition.In the research of language transfer, lexical similarity is that very crucial to be notedas Ringbom who has mentioned “Psychologically similarity is perceived beforedifference”. So as a result of using lexical similarity, learners strategies in learningand production are considered to be of importance.And in terms of these twointerrelated factors, this thesis will investigate them based on the cognitiveperspective. From the theoretical point of view, the thesis firstly takes a review onthe studies of language transfer from historical development. In my research, it is of interest to the methodology used to explore the L2learner sperception of lexical similarity and his written production between a successfullearners group and an unsuccessful group. And in light of the research purpose, thewhole process is divided into two different parts. At first part, questionnaire andVocabulary Levels Test are used to get information about the informants. Then thewriting test is carried out to these informants, followed by some interviews.The major findings in the research can be summarized as follows:1. Due to the greatdifferences between Chinese and English, only the certain features of lexicalsimilarity can be perceived by Chinese learners of English. And the hierarchy ofsome perceived lexical similarity is different in the two groups.The score ofperceived lexical similarity in the successful group is lower than in the unsuccessfulgroup;2. the unsuccessful learners who can perceive more lexical similarity produceand more words and make more errors while the successful learners perceive moredifferences and fewer errors.It indicates that learners perceived lexical similarity isrelated to their production.So to some extent,it can facilitate their learning;3.almostevery student is willing to use the language of mother tongue in the writings.It isreflected in their responses and their interlanguage.The result shows that they wouldlike to adopt some strategies in their compositions.