Cross Language Priming Effect For The Representation And Processing In L2 Emotional Words

Cross-language representation and processing is an important area of psycholinguistics. Researchers have used many kinds of methods and experimental paradigms to discuss the second language acquisition. But the issue of how an adult who already has a fully formed lexicon and conceptual system for their native language represents newly acquired information in a second language has not reached an agreement.Also, in recent years, the relationship between emotion and language processing has become a hot topic in psycholinguistics. The category of words can affect the language representation and processing. As emotional word is a special kind of materials, it has the superior processing mechanism compared to neutral words.Depend on the superiority of emotional words, we want to explore the differences of representation and processing between emotional words and neutral words through the visual presentation. And we will also discuss the differences of conceptual level between emotional words and neutral words in the second language processing, and the relationship between conceptual level and lexical level of the first and second language processing.The research uses the lexical decision task and ERP skill in two experiments. Experiment 1 shows the priming effect from L1 to L2, and the experiment 2 reverses. These experiments use the within-subjects design, contained two factors. The first factor contains positive、negative and neutral conditions. And our research matched the translation equivalens、the semantic-related and semantic-unrelated words to discuss the presentation of Chinese unskilled bilinguals. Forty undergraduates participant in our research which include 9 conditions.The results showed that:(1) The priming effect between experiment 1 and experiment 2 is asymmetric, and this phenomenon only occurred in the translation equivalens.(2) L2 can access the conceptual level directly. And emotional words can access the conceptual level faster than neutral words, especially for the positive words.(3) More significant N400 effect is found in the semantic-unrelated condition, and the emotional words have more significant P200 and LPC effect.(4) All these results partly support the Revised Hierarchical Model and the spreading activation theory of semantic processing partly and also been proved by the sense model.